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1 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. g 



DRAMATISTS 
OF TO-DAY 



ROSTAND, HAUPTMANN, SUDERMANN, 
PINERO, SHAW, PHILLIPS, 
MAETERLINCK 

Being an Informal Discussion of their 
Significant Work 

BY 

EDWARD EVERETT HALE, JR. 




NEW YORK 
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

1905 



THE LIBRARY OF 
CONG I 

Two Coi 

APR 12 1905 

Copyright Fntrv 

afa. /, /C I D ^ 

n^r*f A, 



^ 









Copyright, 1905 

BY 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
Published April, igoj 



THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS, 
RAHWAY, N. J. 



LC Control Number 




tmp96 031284 



Three or four passages in the following pages 
appeared originally in The Dial, which used to 
give me opportunities to write on these matters, 
for which I have always been grateful. I have 
not thought it necessary to break the continuity 
by quotation marks or acknowledgment. Ulti- 
mately it is due to the indulgent kindness of the 
editor of The Dial that these papers came into 
being at all, and where there is so much general 
obligation, it is not important to note a few par- 
ticular paragraphs. 



CONTENTS 

Pace 

A Note on Standards op Criticism . . 1 

Rostand 12 

Hauptmann 37 

sudermann 62 

PlNERO 83 

Bernard Shaw ..... 102 

Stephen Phillips ... . . . 126 

Maeterlinck . . . . . .147 

Our Idea of Tragedy .... 176 

Appendix 203 

Index 225 



A NOTE ON STANDARDS OF 
CRITICISM 

Of old a " Critick " studied the masters in any 
given form of art and thus learned the rules of 
that art. He might then consider whatever came 
to his notice and pronounce it good or bad. We 
commonly do much the same sort of thing now, 
when we read merely for fun. We have, every 
one of us, got together, consciously or uncon- 
sciously, some ideas on what's what as to novels or 
short stories or plays or pictures, and when we 
read or hear or see anything, we instinctively form 
some judgment of it according to whatever those 
ideas may be. The process we perhaps express 
by saying, " I don't pretend to know anything 
about criticism, but I know what I like." Whether 
we acknowledge it or not, we commonly form our 
opinion about current books and plays on some 
such basis. 

This mode of judgment, still popular with the 
general reader, was abandoned by many brilliant 
critics some time ago. It seemed foolish to com- 



2 STANDARDS OF CRITICISM 

pare indifferently artists of all countries and 
ages, to call Shakespeare a barbarian because he 
was not Sophocles, or Sophocles an old grand- 
mother because he was not Shakespeare. And 
with the growing idea of natural development in 
every line of human interest came that form of 
criticism which seeks to explain every work of art 
by the circumstances, which views it, not in and 
by itself, but in its coming to be. The idea has 
taken all forms: Herder in Germany, Mme. de 
Stael, Chateaubriand, Sainte-Beuve, Taine in 
France developed the idea, not only as applied to 
the character of any individual artist, but as the 
expression of the spirit of national life. Morelli 
immensely influenced the modern criticism of 
painting by bringing the matter down to the 
psychic and physical habits and powers of any 
given artist, and there have been many minor 
efforts to do the same thing in literature. The 
main idea is in all cases the same: the work of art 
— picture, poem, play — is the result of certain 
forces; if you would rightly understand the art, 
first get at the forces. This view may seem to be 
historical or scientific rather than critical; if 
everything is just what it had to be in the due 
course of nature, can we call one thing better than 
another? Taine was extremely ingenious in offer- 
ing an answer to this question. 



STANDARDS OF CRITICISM 3 

The world was getting rather accustomed to 
this idea when it was called upon to accept an- 
other. Ruskin proclaimed that art was a teacher, 
and drew away after him a third part of the art- 
lovers of the world into a place whence it has been 
hard to escape. In time it appeared, however, 
that it was not especially necessary that art 
should be a teacher: the significance of the earlier 
criticism of Walter Pater lies in the fact that he 
saw that art was a power working upon the human 
spirit. This is so obviously the case — indeed 
Hazlitt had assumed it a century ago — that it 
was natural that the idea should be carried to its 
logical conclusion by somebody. Anatole France 
presumably came upon it himself, for it is the 
most natural accompaniment of his delightful 
effort to reduce everything to = 0. And many 
others have used the idea with great effect, notably 
Mr. Berenson, who, having found out to the utter- 
most jot and tittle how Italian art came into 
existence, now goes on and tells us what it was 
and has been to the world, and what it may be 
to us. 

The drama is more a personal than a theoret- 
ical matter. Every one goes to see plays; every 
one is in some way or other affected by them. In 
most cases the effect will be no more than comes 
from a period of rest to a spirit wearied by the rest- 



4 STANDARDS OF CRITICISM 

less work or play or ennui of life from day to day. 
A relaxation, a recess, a recreation; such is the 
theatre to most. But even as such it must be 
something more. If this man always does one 
thing and that man does something else, they will 
certainly differ in time. If one man commonly 
goes for an evening's amusement to so-called 
vaudeville, and another for an evening's amuse- 
ment commonly goes to see Shakespeare (suppos- 
ing he had the chance), there will surely be some 
difference finally, other things being equal, be- 
tween the two. The theatre is too powerful a stim- 
ulus for any spirit at all sensitive to escape it 
wholly. Let us look at its possible effects. 

This, at least, is what I commonly find myself 
doing. No one will entirely avoid being dogmatic 
or descriptive; no one will avoid some thought of 
environment or influence or development. But the 
main thing is the effect upon the spirit. I shall 
not of course emulate the example of Ruskin, with 
his notion that art is didactic and that one must 
become as a little child at the feet of prophets, 
who at the present day are as apt to resemble 
Hosea as Isaiah. Nor shall I follow the steps of 
the charming arch-sceptic of our time, which lead 
to that void of absolute zero in which his spirit 
bathes with such obvious refreshment. I remain 
on an isthmus of a middle state. Somewhere about 



STANDARDS OF CRITICISM 5 

halfway between the holy mountain and the abyss 
do I mount beside the puppet booth and give, as 
though a barker, some comment on the dramatists 
of our day. 

From such a standpoint no one will expect 
broad and comprehensive surveys; the real pleas- 
ure and stimulus in a mountain view, say, or in- 
deed any other view, does not consist in a mastery 
of all the details; it is something very different. 
A delightful landscape charms one at the moment 
and makes itself thenceforward an influence in the 
mind, so that one is happier at one or another 
moment for the thinking of it. So it is with other 
things in life, and especially with art; one is im- 
mensely struck by a picture, it may be, and it 
remains in one's thoughts a long, long time, 
having part in all sorts of unknown psychoses; 
one hears music, and a melody or a phrase stays by 
one, often running in the head in very trivial 
fashion, but often serving finer ends. To discern 
and analyse these things is something that crit- 
icism has hardly tried to accomplish, but it is cer- 
tainly a thing to be done. The purists always 
think they can tell you what correct pronuncia- 
tion ought to be, but it is really necessary, first, 
to know what everyday pronunciation is. Before 
one can lay down the law as to how one ought to 



6 STANDARDS OF CRITICISM 

feel about a drama, it is but reasonable to try to 
find out how one really does feel. 

And this is somehow not a very easy matter: 
it would seem as though people after a play pre- 
ferred to think rather than feel. It is not very 
difficult to think about a play that one has seen 
or read, and that may be the reason that most 
people do so. But note theatrical criticism and 
see how little consists of impression, save in the 
most general terms, and how much of knowledge, 
opinion, gossip. It is true that one must have a 
good deal in the way of facts and recollections ; 
the impressions made by a play upon a mind like 
Locke's white paper will not be of much interest 
in a complex civilisation. One must do a good 
deal in the way of description and analysis of 
character, construction, situation, for that is 
often the only way that one can present one's im- 
pressions, and those things are immensely inter- 
esting and valuable for themselves or in relation 
to other criticism. All is, they are not the main 
thing here : if they were, I should have to apologise 
for many omissions and, I suppose, not a few com- 
missions. No one, I hope, will carp at my neglect- 
ing academic system and completeness. I have so 
much lecturing on literature from day to day, so 
much of the academic way of looking at things, 
that it is really a means to mental health to do 



STANDARDS OF CRITICISM 7 

something else. There are many other dramatists 
of our day who ought to have their part in any 
real treatise on the current drama. From the 
ferocious Strindberg on the north to the equally 
ferocious d'Annunzio on the south, from the sym- 
bolic Mr. Yeats on the other side of the water 
to our own Mr. Clyde Fitch, whose cymbals tinkle 
rather differently, there are several dramatists as 
interesting as some of whom I speak. And then 
there is Ibsen; no one can neglect him, nor, in- 
deed, have I done so; for although Ibsen is not 
precisely a dramatist of our day, he is a remark- 
able influence on the drama of our day. To us in 
America Ibsen belongs to the past or to the future, 
surely not to the present. And since there are many 
books and essays on Ibsen, I have thought it as well 
not to attempt any new estimate of his work. In 
fact these papers make no attempt at a complete 
and systematic view. In trying to form such a 
view of the work of our time, much of the freshness 
and spontaneity would be lost, and even then the 
game would not be worth the candle, for in a few 
years something would turn up that would make 
what had been systematic seem very desultory. 
Current criticism should, I suppose, result from 
something pretty definite in the way of ideas, but 
I doubt if it need result in anything definite in the 
way of system. 



8 STANDARDS OF CRITICISM 

A play presents its material to us in a concen- 
trated form attained by certain devices which, 
though literary in character, are usually devel- 
oped from the necessities of the stage of the 
period. When the play is actually presented on 
the stage, its effect is heightened by many devices 
which are not literary in character, as acting, 
stage-setting, and so forth. It is interesting to 
note these devices, these ways in which the im- 
pression is made upon us, to point them out, to 
talk of them. There is an immense amount of 
very interesting stuff here; indeed, it makes the 
greater part of technical dramatic criticism. But 
it is all only means to an end ; the real end is that 
we ourselves shall be affected somehow or other 
by the play. If we are nowise affected, or affected 
in a way we dislike, we might as well stay at home ; 
or if we are at home reading the play, we might 
as well read something else or nothing at all. Our 
interest in these contemporary dramatists is that 
we get something from them. 

This something, in the case of a play of any 
value, always lasts for a while, perhaps a day or 
two only, perhaps merely during supper after the 
theatre, but generally longer. To state precisely 
the general nature of this effect in simple lan- 
guage is not at all easy ; I do not know that it has 
ever been very systematically analysed. Neglect- 



STANDARDS OF CRITICISM 9 

ing, however, such accidents as a sweet smile, a 
phrase of music or of words, a beautiful dress, we 
may say that we shall usually have in mind a bit 
of human experience. This experience may be, in 
its general circumstance, familiar to us, as in 
" Candida," or it may be quite unfamiliar or even 
impossible, as in " Die versunkene Glocke," but 
human experience it is, or it does not remain long 
with us. 

Just what we do with this new possession will 
differ according as we differ, but the main things 
that we do will be one or another of these follow- 
ing. We may deal with it as we should with any 
piece of real life, laugh or cry over it at the time, 
think about it and talk about it afterwards as 
though it were real. How was it with Mrs. Tan- 
queray? Was it right or wrong that the world 
should have used her as it did? Our views on 
these matters may very probably be influenced by 
the dramatist, but we commonly neglect that con- 
sideration and think and talk as we should of real 
people. Or next, we may be pleased with some- 
thing in the play because, though not real life, it 
is such an absolute resemblance of it. Miss 
Prossy, for instance, and " Prossy's complaint " 
will give a thrill of pleasure because they so per- 
fectly resemble something that may not in itself 
be so very interesting to us. It is very fine, we 



10 STANDARDS OF CRITICISM 

say, because it is so true. Thirdly, this human 
experience may concentrate itself, as it were, in a 
figure or situation that will appear to us to imply 
or signify something of importance, which figure 
or situation will recur to the mind at one time or 
another with a good deal of the original feeling 
with which we first experienced it. This is one 
reason why Mme. Bernhardt is such a powerful 
ally to any dramatist: she readily makes herself a 
dramatic figure. 

This last process, I rather think, is the most 
specifically connected with the drama. The first 
is a little naive ; it reminds one of the many stories 
about inexperienced persons in the eighteenth cen- 
tury or in frontier towns or early in life, who 
thought that the play actually was real life. It 
is something which has no especial connection with 
the drama; it may occur well enough with any 
form of representative art just as it may with life 
itself. The second is a great pleasure undoubt- 
edly; it has been noted by many an analyst be- 
fore and after Pope; still it gets from the drama 
only what one may get from all literature and all 
graphic art as well. The last seems to me the 
pleasure particularly dramatic, for just this 
result the drama is particularly fitted to give by 
all its especial powers and devices, and to quite 
the same degree no one of the other arts can give 



STANDARDS OF CRITICISM 11 

it. Something of the kind we have from painting 
and from fiction and poetry, but the drama com- 
bines the powers of the two. It gives us figures 
for the eye and for the imagination at the same 
time. To have such impressions is in itself an 
aesthetic pleasure of the purest kind. What re- 
sults from it is another matter. 



ROSTAND 

When M. Edmond Rostand became a member 
of the French Academy, he was accepted as a man 
of letters of the first rank by a body which has 
made mistakes, but still holds the respect of the 
world. His reception was therefore an event. I 
read that even from the outside of the Palais de 
PInstitut one could " measure all the importance 
of that ceremony." To perform that feat, my 
authority continues, it was enough, at least for 
an observer well up in his " Tout Paris," to see 
the people going in and coming out ; the different 
persons of importance in " les mondes litteraire, 
artistique, scientifique, aristocratique, diploma- 
tique," who formed groups " d'un charactere sug- 
gestif et d'un interet document aire." Not being 
very strong myself in " Tout Paris," I must con- 
fess tliat the only one of these groups presented by 
V Illustration that was of real interest to me was 
that consisting of M. Rostand himself in a cocked 
hat and a cloak, with a sword sticking from under 
it, preceded by an usher. And from a considera- 
tion of the other groups, I incline to think that the 
12 



ROSTAND 13 

importance of the occasion may be measured, per- 
haps, but not fully estimated, by a consideration 
of the persons who were present at it, although it 
is of interest to be told that there were more guests 
than there have been at any such occasion in the 
last half -century. 

In fact various writers have estimated the sig- 
nificance of the event in a totally different manner. 
They have considered it as bringing forward the 
question of M. Rostand's position from the stand- 
point of literature. 

From the standpoint of literature it will be ob- 
served, rather than from the standpoint of the 
theatre. For it seems obvious that a man need 
not have any position in literature by virtue of 
theatrical masterpieces alone. Other positions he 
will have thereby, but not a position in literature ; 
for that one must produce books that people will 
read. Literature is a matter of letters rather 
than of sounds, one may say. A man may be a 
great talker, but only rarely does one gain a place 
in literature by conversation alone; Boswells are 
too rare. One may be a great orator, but even 
so, one is known in literature by the printed form, 
as when Macaulay wrote out his speeches, ten and 
twenty years after he made them, not in the pre- 
cise words he had used, which were irrevocably lost, 
but in words which he might have used. So with 



14 ROSTAND 

the dramatist. If his work have anything of 
literature in it, it will be something that will stand 
the test of type. 

The theatre, undoubtedly, produces often mat- 
ters that are most delightful when put in book 
form, but the theatre, as such, is not concerned 
in that fact. Of the innumerable forms of the 
drama, many have little about them that can be 
called literature, — melodrama and farce, as a rule, 
the clever extempore drama of Italy and other 
lands, the pantomime which often has a strikingly 
dramatic quality without a single word, and, we 
may add, the now extinct Weber and Fields bur- 
lesque, which seems to have been a theatrical genre 
of great interest to the student of the stage, in its 
possibilities at least. 

This matter is clear enough to the keen-eyed 
critics of M. Rostand's own country. They looked 
upon his reception into the Academy with interest, 
because, as they said, although he had dominated 
the purely theatrical criticism, he had not, up to 
that time, wholly won over the critics of literature. 
" If the people of the theatre can hardly speak of 
M. Rostand without a sort of amorous emotion in 
the voice, literary people have been able, on the 
contrary, to make him the subject of a more un- 
moved criticism." Such at least was the view of M. 
Gustave Kahn, who went on to consider " la 



ROSTAND 15 

valeur litteraire " of the author of u Cyrano H 
and " L'Aiglon." 

I must leave M. Kahn to his own opinions, for 
it is surely none of my business to controvert or 
agree with the ideas of a French critic on the 
position in French literature of a French drama- 
tist. But the point is noteworthy in this way : M. 
Rostand had a great success, out of France at 
least, for reasons that were somewhat non-theat- 
rical, or that were at least supposed to be. In 
Germany the critics, at least, laid stress upon his 
ideas and in this country something of the sort was 
the case. Not that it was not delightful to see his 
plays at the theatre; not that, had he presented 
his ideas in other forms, they would have been as 
successful as they were; neither of these supposi- 
tions is the case. But given the theatrical success 
of M. Rostand, a thing that he possessed in com- 
mon, for instance, with Mr. Clyde Fitch or Mr. 
David Belasco, that which was the staying quality, 
outside of France at least, was the literature and 
not the extreme theatrical skill. 

Of course many of those most ready or compe- 
tent to speak on this subject are of a very different 
opinion. But what will you have? A man cannot 
be always thinking like other people, he must wan- 
der off by himself sometimes. And if, in such wan- 
derings, his views are false or foolish, the best 



16 ROSTAND 

thing to do is to speak them out, for then he will 
be corrected by those who are wiser. So I offer 
my view of the literary element and quality in the 
work of M. Rostand with perfect cheerfulness, 
even though it is very different from that of — well, 
various people of consideration. And there is cer- 
tainly pleasure in looking over the work of M. Ros- 
tand, as though he were not a successful play- 
wright who maybe seen (let us hope, again) at the 
theatre, presented by the most charming or the 
most dominating of the actresses of the day, but 
rather — what shall I say? — rather as though he 
were one of the great dramatists of the literature 
of the past, whose work is now withdrawn from 
the glare of the footlights and enclosed silently 
between covers, for the delight, not of the ground- 
ling or the man from the street, but of the pale 
student under the midnight bulb or the member of 
a popular literary club. 

In M. Rostand's first work for the stage, " Les 
Romanesques," he was surely attractive, but not 
very much more. A writer who thinks that in that 
charming little play we have M. Rostand " tout 
entier, ou il est le meilleur, dans la picaresque 
et la funambulesque," seems to miss so much 
suggested by the later plays that one is tempted 
to ask: Is it really there, all this that we think 
moves us? or can it be that we are reading into 



ROSTAND 17 

the work of the poet ideas which were nothing to 
him and thereby neglecting the very things that 
were in his own mind the real ones? Yet I shall 
for the moment believe that it is not so, and go on 
to say that " Les Romanesques " is not what might 
be expected of the author of " Cyrano de Berge- 
rac." Not because it is slight, nor because it is 
little more than attractive, but because it is a deli- 
cate satire upon the tribe of romancers in general. 
Percinet and Sylvette, two young people who live 
on estates separated by a high wall, are full of a 
fine desire for colour, and beauty, and charm. They 
long for a wonderful life and condemn the com- 
monplace. Their fathers appreciate their dispo- 
sition, too, and, not unwilling to pose a bit them- 
selves, they affect to be bitter enemies. The lovers 
are transported into the seventh heaven and be- 
come Romeo and Juliet. How can they be united? 
They suggest ridiculously impossible plans, and 
then their fathers humour them with a scheme of 
their own. It is delightful while they think it 
genuine, but when they find out that they have been 
tricked they are enraged. Sylvette refuses to be 
married and Percinet goes forth to seek for adven- 
ture in the world. Of course he returns and the 
play ends happily, as the saying is. 

M. Rostand's great triumph was in romance. 
Is it to be said that to begin with a burlesque on 



18 ROSTAND 

romance and to succeed with a romantic triumph 
shows a lack of sincerity ? 

That is not just the way to put it. Men do not 
often jest at what they deem great. But they do 
jest (and often very bitterly, as Rostand does 
not) at the world's perversions of what they deem 
great. Rostand believes in romance, let us say, 
but he has his laugh at the romancers. Did not 
Sir Walter make fun of Julia Mannering? 

These charming lovers are doubtless silly; they 
think they must have exquisite mystery, recondite 
sensation, something strange, out-of-the-way, fas- 
cinating, anything in short that they have not 
got. But so it is also with their everyday fathers : 
they also think they will be satisfied with what 
they have not, but when they have it, Pasquinot is 
bored at Ber gamin's watering pot, and Bergamin 
is bored at Pasquinot's always having a button off 
his waistcoat. Youth is one thing, age is another, 
but both, in so far as they substitute dreams for 
reality, are fair food for wit. 

But what is reality? And here Percinet speaks 
possibly for M. Rostand. 

" It was real for us who thought it real. 

Sylvette. No. My being carried off, like your 
duel, was all made-up. 

Percinet. Your fear was not, madame." 
. The mind that is sincere makes the reality, but 



ROSTAND 19 

people are too ready with the conventional com- 
monplace as with the conventional romance. Ro- 
mance itself may be real enough if it only be real 
romance and not the conventional, the make-believe, 
the fashionable. Percinet on the road, Sylvette in 
the garden, learn that life is not made up of 
phrases and attitudes. 

This was the thing that the Realists and the 
Naturalists and the rest had always had in mind. 
They had laughed at the old romance and its cos- 
tumes and properties, its phrases and attitudes. 
They themselves presented truth. 

So would Rostand, only he would present truth 
differently: the realists presented truth by its 
ever-varying myriad circumstance, he would pre- 
sent it by its essence, its idea, its type. Hence 
" La Princesse Lointaine." 

In " La Princesse Lointaine " we have the ideal- 
ist, the ultra-romantic Rudel, faithful to the 
very door of death to the Princess whom he has 
never seen. But we also have the Princess, too, 
and she is not faithful. She fondles the idea of 
an absent lover devoted to her image, and when she 
hears from the redoubtable Bertrand that her 
lover is at hand sick to death, awaiting her on his 
mattress laid on deck, she will not go to him. And 
why? The subtle Sorismonde suggests a reason. 
" You will not see him who was dear to you in the 



20 ROSTAND 

divine splendour of a dream, because you would 
not see him in the horrible haggardness of the fact ; 
you would keep the recollection of your love still 
noble." 

" Ah, yes ! " says the Princess, " that is the 
only reason." 

But it is not really the contrast of the vision- 
ary love and the haggard fact that moves her. 
It is the contrast between the imaginary love and 
the actuality of the passion that she feels for the 
messenger. Sorismonde tells her that she passes 
from a dream into real life. She says herself that 
she denies the pale flower of the dream for the 
flower of love. But when the experiment is made 
it appears that the flower of love, that the actual- 
ity of life, has been bought at too high a price, 
that there was something even more real in the im- 
agination, in the dream, in the romance. Squar- 
ciafico cannot understand such a thing when it 
occurs in his own humorous accompaniment to 
the lyric motive. He grasps it no better than the 
average realist. " But I am opening your eyes ! " 
he says to the sailors. " And suppose we prefer 
to keep them closed ? " they say in their blundering 
faith, not differing much from many readers of 
Zola. It is only when she has given up the passion 
of actuality, and returned to the old ideal that she 
believed in, that Melissande finds herself on firm 



ROSTAND 21 

ground. At the end she knows the one thing 
needful. 

" La Princesse Lointaine " was not successful 
upon the stage, I believe, and it is not wholly con- 
vincing here and there when one reads it. That 
goes rather without saying. Had it been a first- 
rate play, M. Rostand would have been famous be- 
fore " Cyrano." There is much that is beautiful 
in " La Princesse Lointaine." The indomitable 
hero, the faithful sailors, the audacious quest, the 
intensity of the moment of action, and a very ex- 
quisite reconciliation to the tragic end remain in 
one's mind and may well outweigh a lightness and 
over-refinement of handling. At least one is im- 
pressed with the feeling that here is one who can 
say his word on the deep things of life and give 
his imagining the form of beauty. And here is a 
word spoken with no uncertain voice for the power 
of romance. 

As to " La Samaritaine," that is certainly a 
matter rather hard for the average Anglo-Saxon 
to handle. It is hard to understand the mental 
attitude which conceived the play. It is of course 
not the simplicity which presented much the same 
thing five centuries before, in the mystery plays. 
But then it is hardly the balmy scepticism with 
which another Frenchman, some time since, offered 
the world a Galilean idyl in exchange for an 



22 ROSTAND 

inspired Gospel. However we take it, though, 
we have a play made from an episode in the career 
of the greatest idealist the world has ever seen. 
To my ears, however, all that rings true in the 
play is that which reminds me of words otherwise 
long familiar. The play was not unsuccessful, but 
excited no great interest. 

It was at the very end of the year 1897 that 
" Cyrano de Bergerac " was produced and at once 
achieved an immense success in Paris, and not very 
long after, throughout Europe and America. It 
was a great day for Romance, a second " Her- 
nani." 

In the history of the literature of the nineteenth 
century Cyrano de Bergerac will be a well-remem- 
bered figure — would be something much more than 
that, except that people do not read plays as much 
as they read novels. But even as it is, Cyrano de 
Bergerac is, and will remain, one of the great 
figures which the French literature of our time 
offers the world. As we look back, any one of us, 
into the vista of our earlier days, and recognise 
the figures that arise from the readings of our 
youth, the first to strike us, when we think of our 
early acquaintance with French literature, is the 
figure of the heroic d'Artagnan. Or is it Con- 
suelo? Never mind — the elder Dumas and George 
Sand were the great French writers of our earlier 



ROSTAND 23 

days, as they were of an earlier part of the cen- 
tury. It must have been later in life that we be- 
came acquainted with the Comedie Humaine and 
Marguerite Gautier, with Madame Bovary and the 
Rougon-Macquart family. Whether it were so or 
not in our own individual youth, it was practically 
so with the youth of our time. To readers nour- 
ished on Byron and Scott, France gave the " Three 
Musketeers " and " Monte Cristo," " Mauprat " 
and " Consuelo." Then came the turn of the tide, 
and a generation brought up on Dickens and 
Thackeray and George Eliot put aside childish 
things and were thrilled by the tragedies of Bal- 
zac, Dumas fils, Flaubert, Zola. Of course there 
were other realists, too, — realists everywhere, — 
but these were the men who represented France, 
and who created the typical characters that seize 
the imagination and recollection of all. 

Then, as the century was coming to an end, 
France presented another figure, — and that not 
realistic, but romantic again, — presented it to a 
world that was ready to enjoy romance once more. 
Just as a generation fed on Scott welcomed 
d'Artagnan, so a generation fed on Stevenson 
welcomed Cyrano de Bergerac. The pendulum 
had swung back. 

When, after the duel in the first act, a brilliant 
and heroic musketeer strides out of the crowd and 



24 ROSTAND 

shakes the victorious Cyrano by the hand and dis- 
appears, the incident is more significant than the 
audience appreciates. " Who is that gentle- 
man ? " says Cyrano to Cuigy. " It is M. 
d'Artagnan," says he, and Cyrano turns round; 
but the older hero is gone, and Cyrano holds the 
attention alone. The two are alike and are dif- 
ferent. Both are heroes who fire the old-time 
savage element of the soul, — Gascons, swordsmen, 
indomitable, men of the compelling word and the 
convincing stroke, hot-blooded, honourable, heroic. 
But there is also a difference: one is striking, 
brilliant, magnificent, and the other is almost 
grotesque. He is cruelly grotesque; there is 
nothing to lighten it; it is nothing one can pity, 
like a hump or a club-foot; nothing one can 
delude oneself into thinking fine, like a mountain 
belly and a rocky face or a Rochester sort of 
hideousness; nothing that one can fancy is sig- 
nificant, like a birthmark or a distorted mouth. 
All these things the world would forgive or for- 
get. Here is something ridiculous, something 
that would make any of us shiver and writhe if 
we saw it by our fireside. Here is something that 
touches us cynical, susceptible, bantering people, 
touches us in a very tender place. 

And yet one swallows it, and with it all minor 
matters. Cyrano might, by an enemy, be called a 



ROSTAND 25 

bully and a braggart, but that possibility is 
quite lost in our general sympathy. We do not 
think of that any more than of his nose; we feel 
only that he is a noble figure. This is rather a 
curious thing. It is the result of Realism, I take 
it. In the old, old fairy tale, the beast stopped 
being a beast' when he was loved. The monster 
became Cupid. But Realism pricked that bubble, 
and we recognise to-day even in literature, as a 
rule, that human nature is, and will long continue 
to remain human. We must accept the strange 
mixture of the god and the animal. We must rec- 
ognise that the old-time dreams are dreams — 
beautiful, encouraging, inspiring, to be remem- 
bered and to be thankful for, but not truths that 
we shall ever know. Realism fixed upon us the 
pre-eminent thought of our time that the triumph 
of the spirit is despite the flesh, and the new 
Romanticism profited by the lesson. Our English 
romancers — Mr. Stanley Weyman is a good exam- 
ple of a hundred — did not quite dare. They were 
conscious that their heroes must not be the old-time 
impossibilities, but they compromised, as a rule, 
by having their heroes chumps, stupid though 
well-meaning, and of course successful at the end. 
They did not dare to go to the impossible extreme 
which so often makes the type. M. Rostand did 
dare to do so, and succeeded. 



26 ROSTAND 

Is it a curious thing this swinging over to Ro- 
mance? We used to think that romance was some- 
thing for children. They read about d'Artagnan 
fighting duels or Ivanhoe in the tournaments, while 
their elders read (aloud) Anthony Trollope's ac- 
counts of everyday life reaching the culmination of 
excitement in a rattling fox-hunt. And then sud- 
denly we found that the tide had turned. Not sud- 
denly, perhaps, for long ago I remember my in- 
ward wonder when a man whose taste I esteemed 
told me of his joy in " King Solomon's Mines." 
No, it was not sudden, for no change in taste is sud- 
den, but it was sure nevertheless, so that it is per- 
haps not the less curious. 

Still we may ask, Is the new Romance the same 
as the old? Is Scott the same as Stevenson? Is 
" Cyrano " the same as " Hernani " ? 

Certainly Stevenson is not Scott. He is not so 
large a man for one thing, but for another he is 
not of the same kind. So far as real life is con- 
cerned there is no comparison, Scott is the only 
one to think of. But so far as romance is con- 
cerned, there is little enough comparison either. 
Incomplete as Stevenson is, powerless often to ex- 
press his own convictions, he never tried to present 
figures as empty of real significance as the Master 
of Ravenswood and the Disinherited Knight. He 
sought for the romance of the spirit and not for 



ROSTAND 27 

the external romance of costume and circumstance 
that satisfied Scott. In fact, Realism has had its 
effect, for it has made people more serious. 

Cyrano is surely a character for the playwright. 
" Mais quel geste," he says. It surely was a good 
attitude, — just why who can divine? — that throw- 
ing the bag of crowns on the stage. Nor was Cy- 
rano ever at a loss for such attitudes. He is quite 
without affectation when he sets forth to march 
through Old Paris at the head of that strange 
procession of musicians and soldiers and ac- 
tresses, as well as when the Spanish officer asks: 
" Who are these so determined on death? " he 
replies : " Ce sont les cadets de Gascogne ! " and 
charges the crowd of Imperialists with the few 
that are left. 

Such things are characteristic of him. He must 
do them. We cold-blooded creatures do not un- 
derstand such things. They seem perhaps sense- 
less to us and foolhardy, we do not know what 
they mean. This melodramatic character thrills 
us perhaps, but we cannot sympathise because we 
cannot interpret. To us Cyrano is an actor, and 
we Anglo-Saxons are not individually apt to act, 
nor to respect the actor as such. So we miss one 
side of the man, one of his perfectly natural means 
of expressing himself. 

Only this one side, however, need we miss, if that 



28 ROSTAND 

to some degree. For this dramatic expression so 
natural to Cyrano, as I suppose to all French and 
many more, is but one side of the character. It is 
a mode of expression for certain things, but not 
for everything. There are things about Cyrano 
that do not come to such expression. 

We Anglo-Saxons want ideas or we think we do. 
All else we put aside as being superficial, insincere, 
and so miss the greater part of the dramatic spirit 
of the Latin. But Cyrano has his ideas, too, as 
well as his poses. He is less conscious of them 
perhaps, but he has them, or rather, as we should 
say of his poses, he is them. 

Cyrano is in fact a type — a type of the largest 
class of people in the world (for it includes every 
one), namely those who do not get what they know 
they deserve, who find no chance to do what they 
know they could do, who are so much greater to 
themselves than to the cold world. He is also the 
type of a much smaller class who do not make a 
fuss about the matter, but carry it all off so gaily 
and finely that no one has any consciousness of com- 
plaint, murmuring, repining ; indeed perhaps there 
is at bottom hardly a suspicion of anything of the 
kind. From the girl who is not like other girls, 
from that strange commercial traveller some years 
ago who published poems that his friends might 
know his real self, to the philosopher with his " To 



ROSTAND 29 

be great is to be misunderstood," or to the professor 
who fretted and fumed and lamented, and tor- 
mented himself " because, as he acknowledged to 
himself, the Thou sweet gentleman was not suffi- 
ciently honoured," to the great Queen exclaiming: 
" If my people only knew me as I am ! " we all 
nurse an ideal in our hearts and most of us know 
that it will never be realised, even that it cannot be 
realised. For one reason or another, doubtless, — 
not always a nose, — perhaps even it is the neces- 
sary nature of things, though that is rarely the 
view that we take of it. 

And so Cyrano takes our sympathy. We are 
even as he. With him it is a nose, with us fortu- 
nately a something else, that prevents our stand- 
ing forth to the world for all we are worth. This, 
besides many minor matters, good each in its own 
way, is the thing that unconsciously touches all. 

Yet, because M. Rostand is not Shakespeare or 
some one like him, we do not have everything. 
Some would say because he is a Frenchman, 
decadent, pessimist, morbid, he has nothing more 
to say than just that. Here is a man who was 
fine, strong, brave, good, and never got his due. 
What of it? Well, the rest is silence, or nearly 
so. The last act is pathetic, touching, but not 
illuminating. Certainly Roxane did not love him, 
— or suppose she did, what of it? He had no 



30 ROSTAND 

comprehension of it. And suppose he had had, 
what then? Would that have been what we feel 
the true, the inevitable end? I fear not. 

Still it is a beautiful play. To-night, seven 
years after I read it first and saw it on the stage, 
I read it once more, and that with some misgiving. 
But the beautiful verse has lost none of its beauty ; 
the gaiety and verve and spirit have lost none of 
their lightness; the situations have lost no thrill; 
and the play has much the same meaning as that 
first night when I read it, and it pursued itself 
through my mind till morning, — as much and 
more. 

When a man does something very fine indeed 
he may well fear — or at least his friends may 
fear for him — that he will not be able to do some- 
thing else worthy of being compared with it. 
Until we get used to it, genius so often seems acci- 
dent. There must be some high wave that no 
other wave will reach. When M. Rostand had 
surprised the world with " Cyrano de Bergerac," 
it was not unnatural that the world should sup- 
pose that the next play would not sustain the 
effect. 

Such doubts were set at rest on the appearance 
of " L'Aiglon," when the book was read, and 
doubly so when the play was seen. Many thought 
that M. Rostand had bettered his masterpiece. 



ROSTAND SI 

This tragedy, with its poor, weak little hero, with 
all its frivolity, all its decadent circumstance, 
made a stronger effect than its wonderful prede- 
cessor — stronger, if less obvious. 

As before, we have under very special condi- 
tions a figure of general appeal. This young 
man, yearning after that great inheritance which 
he hears, which he feels is his, imagining it in all 
sorts of glittering and deceptive circumstance, 
treasuring scraps of others' reminiscences, gain- 
ing hope from misinterpreted detail, indulging 
his fancy with aimless triviality, daring in ill- 
advised effort, — for he hardly knows just what, 
— failing and surrendering himself to the inev- 
itable currents of life and even death, — he is not 
for us particularly the young Napoleon, he is 
merely what he essentially is, a poignant example 
of the fate that stands ready for all humanity. 

" L'Aiglon " was first produced in New York not 
long after a revival of " Hamlet," so that it was 
not unnatural to think of the Prince of Denmark 
in his weeds of customary black while looking on 
the French prince in his Austrian white. With- 
out comparing M. Rostand with Shakespeare, we 
may still compare the great figure of English 
romanticism in its heydey with this later figure of 
French romance. It is perhaps singular that in 
an age pre-eminent for exuberant conception and 



32 ROSTAND 

fulfilled achievement the greatest creation of lit- 
erature should have been the man who thought 
too closely on the event, and kept on living to 
say, This thing's to do, until circumstances took 
the matter out of his hands. Not less singular is 
it — if either be singular at all — that at the end 
of a century of unrivalled material achievement 
should appear this presentation of the prince who 
strove to realise his fancies and failed. 

So M. Rostand is not merely a Romanticist in 
the sense that he gives us rattling sword-and- 
mantle plays, in which things happen, according 
to the saying of the day. He is that sort of neo- 
Romanticist whose figures are types — a romancer, 
we may think, of the school of Hawthorne. And 
his figures generally typify the same thing. 
Rudel is the poet whose love for the ideal leads 
him to his own death, happily unknowing of the 
reality which is nearest him. Cyrano is the 
average man, perhaps, though one of immense 
talent, the man who sees what he really is, what he 
really might be, perhaps, but reconciles himself 
slowly to the impossibility of ever making the 
ideal conquer the world. And the Due de Reich- 
stadt surely is an idealist of the first water. No 
confident holder of the faith in the presence of 
undeniable fact was more determined than the 
Duke as he listens to Metternich and finally breaks 



ROSTAND 33 

the mirror. He, too, gives way to the fact of the 
matter, but he is broken and not bent. 

What is it that leads M. Rostand to this pres- 
entation of invariable failure? Is it because he is 
morbid, cynical, pessimistic, etc., etc., etc.? 
Hardly. It is due to something far more general 
than such possibilities, namely, the tragic quality 
of great drama — I had almost said of great lit- 
erature. In spite of all that has been said about 
the agreement of literature and life, there is this 
singular and important difference, that literature 
is in its greatest moments tragic, and that life is 
not. M. Rostand writes as he does because he is 
a dramatist, a poet, a man of letters, and not a 
pastor, a philanthropist, or a philosopher. As 
such he cannot present the world as being all de- 
lightful and right in the end. No great poets 
while they were great have done so; Job, Helen, 
Hamlet, Don Quixote, Faust, Colonel Newcome, — 
these all are tragic figures. 

I cannot pretend to explain, from the stand- 
point of aesthetics, why this should be so. The 
frivolous (and I am often one of them) will say 
that every story must have an end, and that death 
is the only end that will stay ended, among matters 
of importance. Minor matters certainly come to 
an end, as clothes, for instance, the best even of 
dinners, light loves in the portal. But with the 



34 ROSTAND 

really important things it is different. Marriage, 
of course, often plays the role of conclusion, on 
the stage or in the book, but it is one of the un- 
realities of comedy that it does so. Look about 
for an end, and you will find it hard to think of 
any but death or disappointment, which, if it be 
really an end, is much the same thing. 

Without taking this view too seriously, we 
shall perhaps admit that it is not for literature 
to demonstrate that things are going all right. 
That seems rather the office of philosophy (if it 
wants to try it) or of religion. Literature is for 
our emotions. Now happiness is emotionally de- 
lightful, but by its very nature it is not perma- 
nent. " Even in the very temple of Delight, 
veiled Melancholy hath her sovran shrine," said 
Keats, with that direct, far-seeing intensity of 
his. While man is what he is, mere satisfaction 
can never be final. And however this may be in 
art in general, or even in literature or in poetry, 
it is readily enough seen to be so in the drama. 
Comedy certainly is delightful, but the great 
things are tragic. And that is because a great 
dramatic moment, one that will remain with us, 
be permanent, must be complete in itself — that is 
to say, final. Now Romeo and Juliet in the tomb 
of the Capulets are final figures. So Hamlet as 
he utters " The rest is silence." So Lear on the 



ROSTAND 35 

heath, beyond even the power of Nahum Tate. 
Comic figures there are also, but one cannot bear 
to think of Falstaff always laughing. Romantic 
figures there are too, suave and beautiful. Ferdi- 
nand and Miranda, as they play at chess, and 
certainly we should like to believe them eternal, 
but the appeal is very ad hominem, and the wise 
will take it for no more than it is. 

So Cyrano throwing his bag of money on the 
stage is a permanent figure. " Quel geste," he 
says, feeling the thing to the bottom, but without 
troubling to analyse it. So L'Aiglon breaking 
the mirror is a permanent figure. So Rudel on 
the deck of his galley. 

These figures give us dramatic moments. But 
they also mean something, and we Anglo-Saxons 
are dead set on seeing what they mean. " The 
most popular play of the final decade of the cen- 
tury presents no problem whatsoever, and avoids 
any criticism of life," says a critic of eminence, 
as though it were a fault. Mme. Bernhardt and 
M. Coquelin, however, see that these things 
have their meaning for those who appreciate them 
and never think of explaining. So M. Rostand. 
He contents himself with dramatic figures. They 
justify themselves. Explanation belongs to the 
philosopher. 

And we, too, may be satisfied with M. Rostand, 



36 ROSTAND 

in spite of the invariable shade. A greater man 
would perhaps be more reassuring. Tennyson 
has King Arthur fail because it is not in the plan 
of things for any individual to bring in the mil- 
lennium, and Browning believes that a man's reach 
must exceed his grasp. We need not be concerned 
at M. Rostand's being a pessimist, if such he be; 
it is often a fine thing to recognise and admit 
pessimism as an element in life. It is of course 
a pity that his handling is not perfect; the last 
acts of " Cyrano," of " L'Aiglon," are they not 
weak? But even here there is something in har- 
mony with the idea. 



HAUPTMANN 

Ten years ago, say, the name of Gerhardt 
Hauptmann was a magic name; it was almost a 
charm in itself to cause the most glorious aesthetic 
thrills. It represented the finest things in litera- 
ture. It is now rarely heard. " So sinks the 
daystar in the ocean bed, and yet anon flames in 
the forehead of the morning sky." There is for- 
tunately plenty of time. 

Hauptmann, however, never achieved such im- 
mediate, such inordinate, such universal success 
as did M. Rostand. But though he became more 
gradually, if less widely, known, he was, in a way, 
more stimulating and inspiring thereby. M. Ros- 
tand became famous at one stroke. With Haupt- 
mann each new play was a successive emotion and 
excitement. Every new play was a new revela- 
tion of the soul of the artist; it raised, for one 
and another while, those clouds which keep from 
the average soul that intellectual horizon which it 
longs for, that emotional sunlight which puts 
everything into the vivid reality, and makes 
even common things for the time being lovely. 

37 



38 HAUPTMANN 

Hence the thrill with which one first read the 
words — 

" Open the window. Let in Light and God ! " 
To those who had followed Hauptmann play after 
play, they had the added demonstration of actual 
experience. 

It was in 1889 that " Vor Sonnenaufgang " 
was given by the Freie Biihne. The performance 
was made a battlefield between the old school and 
the new. The inordinate excitement of that war, 
of the war of which that was a campaign, has now 
died down. I remember it, and would wonder at 
myself for having been so stirred by it, did I 
not remember also how sincere the emotion was. 
" Horrible things were witnessed " in that play ; 
" A picture of hell itself would have paled by the 
side of it; Zola and Tolstoi would have had to 
confess ' He can do better than we.' " Such were 
the expressions of Spielhagen some time after- 
ward, who held the battlefield to have been a 
Waterloo for the new school. 

When we look back it seems natural enough. 
Hauptmann was of a very sensitive, artistic dis- 
position. He had not found his real power in 
his efforts at sculpture, nor in his studies in 
zoology, nor in his essays at poetry. It was very 
natural that, unless he had been strongly impelled 
in some very different direction, he should have 



HAUPTMANN 39 

followed the influences of the moment. And given 
so much, it was not remarkable that he should 
have gone ahead of the advance. 

When one reads Hauptmann's early plays, " Vor 
Sonnenaufgang," " Das Friedensfest," " Einsame 
Menschen," one thinks, necessarily almost, of 
Tolstoi, Zola, Ibsen. They give us pretty con- 
sistent realism in form and matter. The last is 
by far the best, but if Hauptmann had done no 
better, he would hardly remain in the minds of 
those who have no especial turn for German lit- 
erature. Looking back to the play, I recall most 
readily the figure of Anna Mahr. It is almost 
worth while to re-read the play to vivify that 
strong and delicate figure, typical of so much of 
the life of her time and of ours, at once suggestive 
and tragic. And yet even as a figure — entirely 
aside from the play — Anna Mahr is not the 
dramatic figure that will flash to mind in Magda. 
And whether she be or not, the play itself is cer- 
tainly not greater than " Mutter Erde." So far 
at least Hauptmann had not shown himself 
greater than Sudermann or Max Halbe. He 
went on, however, and did more. 

He remained a realist, even a naturalist. But 
there is not much reminiscence of the great leaders 
in the plays that immediately followed. Haupt- 
mann now strikes out more for himself. In " Die 



40 HAUPTMANN 

Weber " he goes as far as one can readily imagine 
the stage can go. The play is written of a weavers' 
strike. It is not, however, a play that takes a 
weavers' strike for a background, or a setting, 
or a situation in which a hero, or heroine, other 
characters shall be presented. The play takes 
the strike itself for its subject. There is no hero 
and no heroine; characters there are, but only 
because there must be people on the stage to have 
any play at all. The same people do not hold 
our interest; quite a new set of people appear in 
the third act, and we hardly hear of the old ones. 
The strike, however, is before us throughout; the 
strike is the only character of importance; men 
and women appear and disappear only that the 
strike may be presented to us. An extraordinary 
conception, and one subversive of the common 
ideas of the stage, but logical enough realism. 
Hauptmann read about the strike in a pamphlet, 
and proceeded to put it on the stage. The wonder 
is that he could make it seem dramatic and power- 
ful. This wonder, however, he was able to accom- 
plish. 

Still realistic, but this time with a truly artistic 
contempt for logic, Hauptmann next produced a 
play about a beaver-skin. You may see it on the 
German stage to-day : " Devilish funny, but no 
drama and no art," I am told by a wholly com- 



HAUPTMANN 41 

petent authority. I am sorry to say that of it I 
can read only about one word in four, which gives 
me but a fragmentary idea of what it presents. I 
must pass it by; I have enjoyed Hauptmann 
greatly without it. 

This play, however, and another, " College 
Crampton," I learn from the conscientious biog- 
rapher of Hauptmann, were suggested in spirit 
by Moliere. And without as a rule going into 
the question of influences and sources and so on, 
it is curious to note for the moment the different 
forms in which this realist presents himself to us, 
or, rather, presents his view of the world. Real- 
ism, in Zola's phrase, consists of the facts of life 
seen through a temperament. Hauptmann's tem- 
perament would seem to be that of the chame- 
leon ; he is a modern Proteus, and sounds his horn 
from under many disguises. In his first play he 
is like Tolstoi, in his second like Zola, in his third 
like Ibsen. In his fourth we see through the eyes 
of Dr. Zimmermann the pamphleteer. In the fifth 
it is Moliere. Certainly (if Zola be right) it is 
a curious thing that the man will not see through 
his own temperament. 

Still it is to be remarked that another man, and 
he also the greatest artist in letters of his nation 
of his day, did just the same thing. Robert 
Louis Stevenson was a very different man from 



42 HAUPTMANN 

Hauptmann, and had a very different view of the 
world. But he was like him in that, whatever 
his temperament, his artistic and poetic nature 
was always curiously trying and testing new and 
particular methods and ways of doing what he 
wished to do, — " Dr. Jeykll and Mr. Hyde," 
" Prince Otto," " Treasure Island," " Will o' the 
Mill," " The Black Arrow," he is as romantic as 
Hauptmann is realistic. We might recognise all 
those books as by the same man, but in them, 
as in Hauptmann's first plays, we see the man 
using the different forms, the modes of expression 
that we are familiar with elsewhere. It is not 
that an original genius must of necessity invent 
an original form; that is far from the truth. 
But that an original genius should adopt such 
varying specialities of form, each of which seems 
characteristic of something in itself, that does 
seem singular. It would seem to be one of the 
curious things in the psychology of the artist 
that the most exquisite natures often have this 
mimetic character. Perhaps it is because they 
are the most sensitive ; Whistler was a man rather 
like that. 

In all these things, however, Hauptmann was 
a realist, by which I mean that he was absorbed 
and interested in the facts of life, and thought 
it well to present them in much the same way that 



HAUPTMANN 43 

he saw them. The romanticist does not do that: 
he commonly presents his view of life in forms 
that he has not seen. M. Rostand has something to 
say; he likes to present it in forms very different 
from the forms he sees around him. A fanciful 
anywhere " if the costumes are pretty," the mar- 
vellous East of the Crusades, the bare but glowing 
hills of Galilee, Old Paris, Schonbrunn and the 
field of Wagram, — these places and the people 
appertaining to them are interesting to him. 
They recur to his mind, take form and combina- 
tion there, gain a significance from his theory of 
life, from their relation to it, and when they de- 
velop into a finished play they are found to pre- 
sent a fact or facts, a meaning, a lesson, even, for 
such as wish to be taught, but all in the glowing, 
glorious, poetic, imaginative, beautiful figures 
that the poet loved. 

It is not so with Hauptmann. His ideas are 
different from those of M. Rostand for one thing. 
M. Rostand stands aloof and generalises. But 
Hauptmann is near enough to be intensely moved 
by great wrongs and great struggles for redress. 
He is so near the particular thing that he becomes 
absorbed in it. Why should a man who wants to 
present the cruelty and crime involved in the fail- 
ure of a great strike, why should he write about 
the Sacred Mount and the belly and the members? 



44 HAUPTMANN 

True, Shakespeare took that way to say what he 
wished to say, but then Shakespeare can hardly 
have felt about current life as Hauptmann did. 
He was a larger man and had larger views, but 
certainly he controlled very well any great sym- 
pathy he might have had for some of his more 
limited brothers and sisters. 

Hauptmann went in for it seriously. He would 
show the world as it was. And whether he took 
the method of Ibsen or of Moliere, he was always 
there himself with his sympathy, his ideas, and 
his poetry. 

For that he was a poet appeared in what came 
next. I like " Hanneles Himmelfahrt " best of 
all Hauptmann's work, and I am quite sure that 
it is the most characteristic thing he has done. I 
mean to re-read it at this moment. Or, rather, 
I would, except that here it is better to write from 
one's recollection than with one's eye on the text. 
The drama ought to make, to have made, an im- 
pression on one; if it does not it fails, and by as 
much as the impression is not lasting, by so much 
has the drama failed of its possibilities. 

From the midst, then, of a time years back, a 
time full of other work and other interests, a time 
separated from Now by all sorts of differences, 
appears the figure of Hannele cowering in her 
miserable little bed, and of the Angel of Death 



HAUPTMANN 45 

looming up affectionately before the high stove; 
and again of the little girl all aglow with interest 
and excitement, and the good and kind tailor, 
who has brought her the white dress and crystal 
slippers ; and again of the appearance of the 
stranger, the worker, the physician, him of the 
robe without a stain who comes to guide her 
whither she is to go. 

Well, and what of it all? I can imagine some 
disagreeable person saying. Frankly, reader, I 
do not quite know. Those figures were very 
beautiful to me once — if I read the play again 
they would be beautiful once more. 

But beyond that they have their significance. 
I cannot now remember just what they did signify 
to me once, nor can I say that in Hauptmann's 
mind they ever signified such and such thoughts. 
That would give something of a false idea. Haupt- 
mann, himself a thorough-paced realist so far, 
now presents an object different from anything 
that had come from his hand. It is now realistic 
psychology, as we may say, that is the main thing. 
Here is the country almshouse and the wretched 
creatures in it; here is a poor, abused little girl 
who is brought there to die. The play follows 
her last hours and presents her feverish and fan- 
tastic thought. All that follows — the figure of 
her dead mother, the three angels, the sudden 



46 HAUPTMANN 

changes, the great angel with dark garments and 
dark wings, the village tailor, the stranger — is but 
the creation of the fading power of the childish 
soul, mingled curiously with the realities of the 
Deaconess, Pastor Gottwald, and the poor crea- 
tures of the almshouse. That, as a subject for 
a " dream poem," was Hauptmann's interest, I 
suppose, and not such and such ideas signified 
thereby. 

Still the figure and the passing dream bring 
ideas and moods, and bring, too, moments of 
serenity to the soul, even when somewhat choked 
with the materialities of ashes and sugar plums. 

In this play Hauptmann is more himself than 
ever before or since. Heretofore he had tried 
different forms, henceforward he tries more; there 
seems no end to his power of varying the mask 
of form. But everything else that he wrote could 
be put alongside of something else. The early 
plays have easy analogues ; even " Die Weber " 
was preceded by Verhaeren's " The Dawn," which 
is not unlike it. The later plays, too, are in gen- 
eral not unlike others. " Die versunkene Glocke " 
is one of a number of Marchendramen, " Florian 
Geyer " is a historic play, in form at least much 
what Wildendruch might have written ; in " Fuhr- 
mann Henschel " he was said at once to have " re- 
turned " to something that his admirers approved. 



HAUPTMANN 47 

But " Hanneles Himmelf ahrt," the Traum- 
dichtung, resembles nothing else that I can think 
of. It has all the rest of Hauptmann, — the real- 
ism, the psychology, that we have seen, — joined 
to the romance and the poetry that were to have 
freer play in years to come. In motive it is a 
little like Maeterlinck's " Mort de Tintagiles," 
and creates something of the same effect. But 
that is a very different kind of work, and entirely 
lacks the vitality which is one of the virtues of 
" Hannele." 

Like most of the previous plays, " Hannele " 
created a considerable stir, this time on religious 
grounds as well as those of art. Hauptmann 
went on calmly, and instead of trying to do again 
anything he had done well once, he wrote a his- 
torical drama, " Florian Geyer," into which he 
put his whole energy, only to meet with a failure. 
It was followed by " Die versunkene Glocke," the 
play which made Hauptmann really famous, by 
which he is generally known. 

And yet the play is, in a way, not representa- 
tive. If you read only " A Tale of Two Cities " 
you might perhaps wonder that Dickens is often 
thought of as a humourist. If you read only 
" Die versunkene Glocke " you will wonder, per- 
haps, why Hauptmann should be thought of as 
a realist. For it is a romantic, fairy play in 



48 HAUPTMANN 

poetry, very different certainly from the plays 
which had gone before, and different too from 
those that followed. It is without much doubt 
the greatest piece of work of its author, but it is 
work in a very different direction from that in 
which we are accustomed to look for him. It 
was first acted in 1896, and will doubtless be re- 
membered by many either at the Irving Place 
Theatre or as given by Mr. Sothern. 

The play begins at once. Up the mountain, 
into the old, undisturbed world of romance, comes 
the artist, broken-hearted at the failure of his 
work for men. He had tried, perhaps, to do too 
much, and has met failure. 

It is very beautiful, certainly, this world of 
romance. It was beautiful on the stage, and it 
is still beautiful in the play, for one of the charms 
with which literature compensates for its lack of 
vivid visual impressions is that it lasts. It is 
like the walls of Camelot, which were not built at 
all and are therefore built for ever. So we can 
go at will to that upland mountain-meadow, with 
its violets and primroses, and the bees that sip 
gold from the crocuses, and the pines that rustle 
round about. There the Nickelmann lives, or there 
he appears in the spring from his home deep down 
underneath the hills. He is hoary and covered 
/ with moss and weeds. There, too, lives the wood- 



HAUPTMANN 49 

scrattle, a coarse and licentious creature who 
strangely smokes a pipe. There, also, are dwarfs 
and elves. There is Rautendelein, half human, it 
would seem, and half a bit of nature. She plays 
with the bee and teases the Nickelmann and dances 
with the elves, if she chooses, and jeers at the 
wood-scrattle and his goatish legs. She has a 
grandmother, too, a wise woman, who leads rather a 
surly existence among these simple folk and feeds 
the little Trolls with milk. The German forest 
is certainly a fine place, and I have always loved 
it, from early readings in Grimm down; we have 
no such creatures in our forests. And I have 
forgotten the dwarfs who are there, too; and all 
is up on the mountain-side, far above the abodes 
of men. Nature has withdrawn to herself before 
the march of civilisation. What elements of 
humanity there are are merely animal, unless we 
except the natural knowledge of the Wittich. 

So much the play certainly has developed and 
carried out with description and picture ; so much 
for every one, whether more or not. Nature and 
art the play presents, and like any fine big piece 
of work, it is full of all sorts of things that reward 
a reader who may come again and again, as one 
may climb a mountain again and again, and 
always find something new on the way, although 
there is always the same view from the top. When 



50 HAUPTMANN 

Keats wrote " Endymion " he very sensibly noticed 
that it was one of the things that people liked, 
to have enough in a poem to be able to pick and 
choose, to find always some new charm or some- 
thing perhaps that had once charmed and then 
slipped from mind. In this forest region we can 
walk often, always finding something to notice, 
something quaint, beautiful, stimulating. 

Into this world of nature wanders Heinrich, the 
artist. He had almost finished a great and beau- 
tiful work and has been bitterly disappointed by 
failure at the final moment. He gains by chance 
a glimpse of Nature in her secret beauty and 
charm. Before he is brought back to the valley 
by his friends who have come to look for him, he 
sees Rautendelein. 

And here, with the very beginning of the action 
of the play, comes an element into the play that 
is not so simply handled — namely, that which is 
loosely called the symbolism of the play. It would 
seem that in this play of the Artist and Nature 
and the World of Men, there must be some hidden 
meaning. It arouses our curiosity, — a little, I 
am afraid, like a cryptograph, — we want to know 
what it all means. 

The artist who has endured a bitter failure has 
a glimpse of the secrets of nature, and though 
borne down to his home on lower levels, it is by 



HAUPTMANN 51 

one of the spirits of nature that he is cured. He 
leaves his home, and with the fresh, natural being 
he has learned to know he goes up the mountain, 
back to nature once more. He finds his strength 
increased tenfold. But the power of humanity 
is too strong; his dead wife draws him down from 
his retreat. And as for his beautiful spirit of 
nature, half human as she seems, the power of 
nature is too much for her; she is drawn down 
among the founts at the foundations of the earth. 
This is the essential story of the " Versunkene 
Glocke " shorn of its colour, and beauty, and body. 
What would Hauptmann signify by it? 

If it were pretty obvious that he wished to sig- 
nify something of importance, I should think that 
one ought to know what it is. But as the signifi- 
cance is clearly something not, on the face of it, 
obvious — for the author's countrymen have pre- 
sented quite a number of different explanations 
of it — I am content to read the play as a play 
rather than a conundrum. 

So then it may be asked: Is the figure of Hein- 
rich without significance? And, if so, why should 
any dramatic poem have significance ? What does 
Rudel stand for? Cyrano? L'Aiglon? If these 
figures are significant, why not Heinrich? Surely 
it is an eccentric outcome to one's speculation that 
presents M. Rostand as the dramatist of ideas and 



m HAUPTMANN 

Hauptmann the dramatist of legendary romance 
alone. 

The play certainly offers us dramatic situations. 
Let us take one at random. The Pastor has come 
to persuade Heinrich to leave the mountain where 
he is living joyfully and doing great work and to 
return to his home. The artist is flushed with 
success; the visitor is by no means disconcerted 
at what he sees around him. " Now God be 
thanked ! " says he. " You are the same old 
friend. 

Heinrich. I am the same — and yet another, too. 
Open the window. Let in Light and God. 

Pastor. A noble saying. 

Heinrich. I know none better. 

Pastor. I know of better — still that one is 
good." 

Here, certainly, in these few words between the 
Artist who has abandoned his place among men 
and gone to the heart of nature, and the Priest 
who has gone to put before him the claim of a 
power higher than nature, here there certainly is 
significance, such as any one can see, such as is 
almost explicit in words and characters. But 
further there cannot be any symbolic significance 
found for it which equals the real and fundamental 
significance of the words and situation. Take 
the simplest kind of symbolic significance — let us 



HAUPTMANN 53 

say, there are Art and Religion. Surely any such 
abstraction as that is absolutely empty of mean- 
ing when we compare it with the creation of the 
Artist and the Man of God. We have the meaning 
when we merely create in our minds Heinrich, the 
Bell-caster, who is at work among the mountains, 
and the Pastor of his earlier days, who seeks to 
bring him back to his home. I do not mean to go 
into it as a question of Realist or Ideal Philosophy, 
but merely to speak of it as a matter of the drama. 
And here, we may say without the slightest doubt, 
that whatever abstract idea may be implied in 
words and situation, it can add little to the real 
meaning of them. Compared with the intellectual 
and emotional powers which could create the situ- 
ation and words, any further thinking which 
could be tacked to them by allegory, will seem 
feeble in the extreme. " To one reader, ' Die 
versunkene Glocke,' conveys a certain impression; 
to another an entirely different significance may 
be suggested. Both may be right." On the other 
hand both may be, and probably are, wrong, if 
" significance " means explanation of the meaning, 
for the real appeal of the drama is not in any 
significance or meaning, but in its figures and its 
situations and what they are. Heinrich leaves his 
wife and children and goes up the mountain with 
Rautendelein. Why say that it typifies anything 



54 HAUPTMANN 

more than Rip Van Winkle, who did much the 
same thing, except that his elfish beings were 
stout little Dutchmen instead of charming young 
women. The situation is certainly one which 
makes a wide appeal to all sorts of lurking in- 
stincts of the heart. Man is not yet so absolutely 
civilised that such a rush to freedom does not at 
times seem an escape from bothers and monotonies 
which he would often be without. But is it any 
real addition to the impression to say that Art 
finds Domesticity irksome and seeks the freedom 
of Nature? I fancy not. That is a very simple 
piece of generalisation and from a very small num- 
ber of examples, but however that may be, it is 
not as a generalisation that the thing will interest 
us. If we wanted a generalisation we should go to 
the moralist, who would give us the facts with the 
proper inductions and deductions. What we want 
is something for the imagination, something that 
we can sympathise with, something that will have 
more effect upon the fierce fret and grind of darker 
moments than any abstraction has yet been found 
to have. And that we get from the figure itself, 
not from any meaning which it symbolises. 

No — I think we shall gain little by inquiring as 
to the symbolism of " Die versunkene Glocke." 
If it were real symbolism it would be another 
thing. In real symbolism — as that of William 



HAUPTMANN 55 

Blake — the poet, or the painter, has some meaning 
that he conveys by absolute symbols, which, unless 
we know their meaning, will give us no more hint 
of it, than a page of Plato would give a newborn 
child. Thus, in Blake's illustrations to the book 
of Job, we observe the moon to be sometimes in 
one corner of the picture, sometimes in the other. 
That conveys a difference of meaning. I forget 
what it is — I thought it of interest at the time I 
knew it — but the point is that unless you know 
that difference of meaning, you will miss the idea 
of the picture. That is real symbolism. If you do 
not know the key to Blake, it is impossible (unless 
you make one) to know what his pictures are 
about. 

With Hauptmann, as with most artists with 
whom the question is raised, the matter is different. 
With them we generally have, not almost arbi- 
trary symbols, but typical figures. The difference 
is very clear. The cross is a symbol ; the fish used 
to be a symbol. But nobody could have guessed 
what they were symbols of who did not know the 
associations which gave them meaning. On the 
other hand, the Good Samaritan is no symbol; as 
soon as any one knows who and what he was his 
significance is plain and needs no explanation. In 
like manner Heinrich is doubtless a typical figure, 
just as Faust is, or Manfred, or Brand. But 



56 HAUPTMANN 

whatever he is a type of, he himself is, so that one 
who knows him, and who feels his passion and his 
action, has what the poet meant to present, and 
more important, has it in the form in which the 
poet meant to present it. A man may prefer to 
translate the poet's language into his own, but 
that will be because he does not understand poetry, 
or does not like it. It may be a curious intellectual 
exercise to speculate farther, but unless there is 
very good ground for supposing that the poet 
himself went farther, we shall probably miss what 
he meant to express in aiming at what he did not 
think of. 

Of the succeeding plays of Hauptmann, I do 
not propose to speak. Those who thought of 
" Die versunkene Glocke " as the beginning of a 
new epoch, received a shock in " Fuhrmann Hen- 
schel." " Die versunkene Glocke " was presented 
toward the end of 1896 ; a year afterwards ap- 
peared " Cyrano de Bergerac," and it appeared 
that a great romantic awakening was beginning. 
It seems almost cynical for Hauptmann at such 
a period to be considering the situation of a Sile- 
sian carter, who having promised his dead wife not 
to marry, now wished to marry the maid of the 
house. The play was psychological. Now psy- 
chology has its romance, but " Fuhrmann Hen- 
schel " did not carry on the torch uplifted in " Die 



HAUPTMANN 57 

versunkene Glocke." Nor did " Schluck und 
Jau." This was a thoroughly characteristic piece 
of work ; at a time when the world thought it knew 
what Hauptmann could do, he proceeded to do 
something quite beyond anybody's reckoning. 
Few, however, cared for the " Shakespearean " 
farce, nor am I among the number. " Michael 
Kramer," " Der rote Hahn," and " Rose Bernd " 
were not such surprises, but they were not much 
more successful. 

As has often been remarked, Hauptmann is an 
individualist ; he chooses any form that he sees 
fit for self-expression, but he will not harden into 
an everyday conventionality even of his own mak- 
ing. You may sometimes find two of his plays 
that seem very much alike, but rarely are there 
three of a kind. But he gives you himself in each. 

And his subject-matter, too, is likely to be indi- 
vidualistic. John Vockerat and Anna Mahr find 
themselves together in opposition to the world 
about them ; if they " live their own lives " ( i. e. 
do as they please) they will harm other people's. 
Heinrich the Bell-founder pursues life in his own 
way, in despite of the pressure upon him of the 
ideas and ways of the world. They are not, as 
a rule, powerful personalities, nor does Haupt- 
mann generally represent them as victorious — 
indeed the reverse is the case — but they are individ- 



58 HAUPTMANN 

ualists. The reverse is shown in " The Weavers n 
and, I suppose, in " Hannele." It is a very common 
modern motive, appearing in all sorts of forms, 
mingling often with such inconsistencies as social- 
ism. Even where it is not pre-eminent in Haupt- 
mann, you will commonly feel its influence. He 
seems to hold himself aloof with the resolve to be 
himself, letting the world take him or leave him as 
it will. Of his fifteen plays hardly a half can be 
said to have been successful, save with the most 
devoted. 

In such a case there is a curious, perhaps a 
wholly unpoetic interest in " Der arme Heinrich." 
The play is founded on the poem of Hartmann von 
Aue; the story tells how Heinrich, lord of Aue, a 
brilliant and splendid knight, distinguished by the 
king and famous for his exploits in the Crusades, 
chief paladin of the Holy Roman Empire, at the 
very height of his glory and the vigour of his life 
and joy in the world, was suddenly struck with 
leprosy. Instead of being the most wonderful of 
those remarkable combinations of imagination and 
action which the mediaeval chivalry holds out to us, 
he became simply an outcast, an object of loath- 
ing, one who had to live in some squalid place by 
himself, and who had to strike continually on a 
wooden clapper that people might know that he 
was near and avoid him. 



HAUPTMANN 59 

That is a fine subject for the individualist; a 
leper has to live his own life partly because no one 
else wants to live any part of it for him, and partly 
because no one else will let him share a life in com- 
mon. In the beginning of the play Heinrich is 
among those who are devoted to him, a liegeman 
of the house of Aue, an old retainer, a farm ten- 
ant and his wife. They are not only his followers, 
but they love him, before they know his secret. 
Then his clapper sends a shiver through them. 

There is therefore an interest, perhaps unpoetic, 
in the lord and leper. Why does Hauptmann, 
whose heroes seemed ready to stand out for them- 
selves against God and man, who lived their own 
lives and died their own deaths, why does he now 
present to us the figure of one who, in his pride, 
is guilty of insolence to God and is struck down 
by the powers he has scorned into a terrible irony 
of the state to which he aspired And why, as a 
sequel to Heinrich the Bell-founder, does he elect 
to present a man, who, in seeking the highest, falls 
to the lowest, and must be rescued from the most 
awful depths by the unselfish devotion of a girl 
who, so far from wishing to live for herself, de- 
sires rather to die for him? 

I cannot say, nor do I believe it necessary at 
once to determine. Read and study a man's life 
and his writings, and the eccentricities and incon- 



60 HAUPTMANN 

sistencies are smoothed out and what was strange 
appears sane. But does the work mean more to 
us? It certainly does, if we misapprehended it 
before and know it rightly now. It is well enough 
for an experiment to think we can take a poet's 
work in some sense and meaning other than that 
he had for it, but in the main we lose thereby, for 
we get ourself and not the poet. In the long run 
we must always wish to interpret a poem by the 
poet's whole life and work. 

But that with " Der arme Heinrich " is not, I 
believe, possible. The genius of Hauptmann is 
constantly baffling us. So I take the poem much 
as it stands, an old German saga, with all the 
charm of mediasvalism in its material and great 
simplicity and reserve in its handling, and a de- 
voted almost mystical air that is much in the tone 
of " Hannele." With the other great play, 
" Die versunkene Glocke," this one stands in 
strange contrast. They present to us two con- 
ceptions which are consistent only as many of 
the strange antinomies of life are consistent, in be- 
ing both true at once, we cannot well say how. The 
two strains of revolt and resignation; one in the 
figure of the artist maintaining himself stiffly 
through the darkness till daybreak, and the other 
poor humanity (prince like beggar girl) which 
bows the head and finds happiness in submission. 



HAUPTMANN 61 

These three plays, I find, are almost the only 
ones of Hauptmann that I care much to look over, 
that abide in my mind. Perhaps it is because 
I am growing more romantic with the added 
years (contrary to the usual notion that youth is 
the time for romance) and do not care so much 
for the sanded arena of the world as in the period 
of youth. Perhaps, also, I should not have liked 
" Der arme Heinrich " twenty years ago as well 
as the story of Heinrich the Bell-founder. But 
now, having paid my money (in various ways), I 
rather like to take my choice. 



SUDERMANN 

There used to be, in Germany at least, quite 
a general critical opinion which placed Sudermann 
as a dramatist somewhere between Hauptmann 
and Wildenbruch. Hauptmann was the delight 
of the advanced guard and Wildenbruch was the 
favourite of the conservatives ; Sudermann seemed 
to be somewhere between the two. As far as one 
could learn, however, he was not admired by ad- 
vanced guard and conservative alike, but on the 
other hand was condemned at least by the ultras 
of each party. One side called him a compromiser 
and conventionalist, and the other said that he 
merely used old technique for exploiting sensa- 
tional claptrap in the way of so-called ideas. The 
more advanced said that his dialogue was written 
for schoolgirls, the conservatives said that his 
material was light-headed extravagance. He was, 
I believe, in Germany the representative of " Real- 
ismus," while Hauptmann's particular lay was 
" Naturalismus," and Wildenbruch's I don't know 
just what. 

For myself I am inclined to like this middle po- 
62 



SUDERMANN 63 

sition and to think of his plays in the words ap- 
plied to that unknown dramatist whose works were 
caviare to the general (not that Sudermann's 
are), namely, that it is " an excellent play, well 
digested in the scenes, set down with as much 
modesty as cunning." His method is, compara- 
tively speaking, as wholesome as sweet, and by 
very much more handsome than fine. In other 
words, while Sudermann's plays have not the bril- 
liancy and exhilaration of some of the dramatists 
of our day, in form at least, and dialogue, they 
are well put together and written. But with such 
matters it would be impertinent for me to meddle, 
for one would hardly expect one who did not fol- 
low German literature pretty closely to have an 
opinion on these things. 

Nor are they much in my line, although there 
is or may be a good deal of interest in them. If 
one have read more or less of the literature of the 
last twenty-five years in the various parts of the 
world, and seen pictures, and heard music, and 
gone to the theatre, there is fascination in these 
considerations of schools and tendencies and influ- 
ences, past, present, and future. There is some- 
thing inspiring in the largeness of it. And cer- 
tainly, too, there is a sort of lyric fervour in 
Hauptmann which one may feel the lack of in 
Sudermann. And in Wildenbruch there is doubt- 



64 SUDERMANN 

less something, too (only I can never quite get at 
it), which brings out by contrast the qualities of 
Sudermann. And it must be inspiring to read 
" Sturmgeselle Sokrates " and to speculate on the 
future of the German drama. 

But all that, in itself, seems to me to neglect 
so much. Sudermann is to me so personal a writer 
that when I see a play of his or read one (which 
is much more often), all talk of influence or esti- 
mates falls into the background, while my sympa- 
thies and emotions are more wrung, I believe, than 
by any of the others, and always have been. Not 
that it is everything to have one's sympathies and 
emotions wrung, — it does not necessarily mean the 
highest art, — but it surely is something, and a 
something that does not leave one free to con- 
sider questions of criticism. Nor can it be to me 
alone that the plays of Sudermann make a very 
personal appeal. Bernard Shaw can undoubtedly 
show us hollow places in our modern life so that we 
recognise the truth with a quick thrill of pleasure. 
But however things ought to be, there are some 
things that thrill us now. And if Sudermann can- 
not, or does not, see just what life should be, he 
certainly can give us sudden realisations of what 
life actually is; can touch us to the quick by his 
poignant moments of life as we realise it, mo- 
ments in which we cease for the time from being so- 



SUDERMANN 65 

cial figures and relapse into individualism. M. Ros- 
tand takes us as individuals and touches us by an 
appreciation of select moods, of our higher and 
better moods; he presents to us, in his curiously 
pessimistic way, moments of personality, ideals of 
possibility, of standing rigidly in one's own self 
while the world melts and crumbles away below. 
But if Sudermann cannot or does not have much 
to say about the ideal, he certainly can give us 
keen feelings of the way our personality comes 
in contact with those personalities next to us, who 
are with us day by day, enveloped, save for one 
time and another, in the impenetrable reserve that 
keeps us commonly each to ourself. 

Sudermann's motives are always, in his most 
characteristic plays at least, combinations of those 
great conflicts, or at least antagonisms or discords 
of life, that every one, here in America to some de- 
gree, as well as in Germany, finds among the con- 
ditions with which he must take account. Home 
and the outside world, the old generation and the 
new, conventionalism and individualism, personal- 
ity and society, faith and new ideas, art and 
everyday life — who is there to-day who has not 
some personal experience of such things as these? 
Strife or conflict may be too stern a name for 
them in ordinary life; but surely they make dis- 
harmonies, incongruities, and often worse. Do 



66 SUDERMANN 

they make up more of our life to-day than they 
did of the life in other times? I cannot say, but 
certainly they make much. And it is an evidence 
that Sudermann sees life truly, in its larger lines, 
that, in his stronger plays, they are rarely miss- 
ing. 

Not that these motives are always dragged into 
his dramas, but it would seem as if these ideas, be- 
ing often in his mind, continually influenced his 
choice of subject or the moulding of his material. 
" Die Ehre," his first play, has much the same 
subject as Wildenbruch's "Die Haubenlerche " : 
each concerns the relations of a rich family to a 
poor family among its dependents ; each shows the 
rich offering benefits for a return in flesh and 
blood and honour. There are strong situations 
in each play and both were successful on the stage. 
But Wildenbruch's play is thin and conventional 
compared to Sudermann's, on account of the con- 
flicting motives in " Die Ehre " to which one easily 
finds an answer in one's own life. Robert, who 
has been ten years in India, accustomed to a 
larger, more modern life, comes back to a re- 
stricted, old-fashioned, very lower middle-class 
family; Alma, who has stayed at home, has been 
continually escaping from the annoyances of 
parental control to the temptations of the free, 
half-bohemian circle to which she finds her way. 



SUDERMANN 67 

It is all the same sort of thing that we may easily 
see around us ; it does not take particularly strik- 
ing forms as we see it, but it would if a dramatist 
should deal with it. Robert comes back from the 
freedom of his independent life to the pettiness 
of his old father and mother; so do hundreds of 
boys and girls come back from college, say, to 
the farm. Alma, who chafes under the restric- 
tions of the elder generation, wishes to seek the 
glittering show of pleasure in her own way; and 
we have examples of that, too, from the farm to 
the city, or from the house to the street. It is 
no great exhibition of genius to have noted so 
much, but it is, I think, a piece of genius to con- 
ceive an action that shall be a focus for half a 
dozen such motives, to carry it on by characters 
that shall continually represent them to us, and 
to express them and comment on them by con- 
tinual epigram or chance remark that strike us 
surely and often remain in the mind. 

Just what the action is seems to me of lesser 
importance, if only it be interesting. " Die 
Ehre " was a successful play, and the critics, as 
a whole, paid very little attention to what I have 
been speaking of. Thus Bulthaupt, who is rep- 
resentative enough, criticises the play severely 
because of Graf Trast's disquisitions on Honour. 
Now that turns the play into what is hideously 



68 SUDERMANN 

called a problem-play. And further, it makes the 
play something that we, over here, cannot easily 
get hold of, for our ideas on Honour are different 
in many respects from those current in Germany, 
and though we may understand their feeling well 
enough, and Sudermann's criticisms of it, yet it 
can hardly be a matter which we shall feel very 
keenly. Most Americans, I fancy, would agree 
with Graf Trast — he is meant to be a man who 
had seen the world — in his view that Honour dif- 
fers with different people, being one thing in one 
nation or class and something else in another, and 
that if conventional honour were dispensed with 
in favour of duty, the world would be quite as 
well off. 

But is this sort of speculation the play? Is a 
play the resolution (however good) of such a 
problem? Hardly; here is a play of men and 
women and the tides of life. Surely such things 
are more interesting than questions and problems, 
certainly more widespread. 

Whether they are or not, this may be said : the 
same discords or disharmonies of life that one 
observes in " Die Ehre " are to be seen in 
" Sodom's Ende." It is true that this play 
ostensibly differs from the former; that play 
offers us, according to the critics, a criticism of 
current conceptions of honour, and this, they tell 



SUDERMANN 69 

us, is a criticism of some current conceptions of 
artistic life. 

But if one do not think of such things, one finds 
that here too we have personalities and the cur- 
rents of life of our time. Here is the cramped 
home of the ruined proprietor turned milk-in- 
spector, and the phosphorescent rottenness of his 
son Willy, a notable figure in the great (Berlin) 
world of art and ideas. Here are the simple con- 
ceptions of the old people and the younger but 
decadent world of the critics, and those who catch 
up their words. Here is the dim but deeply 
rooted conception of duty and the half -acknow- 
ledged sophistries of those who think their own 
thoughts and live their own lives. Perhaps the 
play is not so broad as " Die Ehre," but it is 
stronger in its action, for each play of course 
has some action which finds its course in the inter- 
action of the forces of the world which it por- 
trays. Its chief figure is more striking than 
Robert in " Die Ehre." Willy Janikow is not so 
much a character as a personality. The artist of 
promise, son of parents whose life is now of the 
hardest, the man who has come to success in a 
world where he cannot keep his head, loved by 
so many and such a hard master to himself, I 
remember him well sitting in the fading daylight 
in his father's house, which he is about to leave* 



70 SUDERMANN 

murmuring " Reinheit, Reinheit." I remember 
him well as he gathers himself together in his 
studio, but too late, with the cry of " Arbeit ! " 
just as the curtain falls. Somewhat conventional 
that is, without a doubt; Sudermann uses conven- 
tional modes of expression in a way Hauptmann 
would never do, and that seems to take away from 
his power with many. But I do not think that 
it stands in the way of effect ; it does not seem to 
stand in the way of sincerity. 

But it is in " Heimat " that all these motives 
have freest play. As it is given in English, the 
play is always called " Magda," and that is some- 
thing of a mistake. And the character of Magda 
has attracted the greatest actresses of our day, — 
Bernhardt, Duse, Mrs. Campbell, Mrs. Fiske, — 
and that, though not a mistake, is something that 
rather veils the true nature of the play. Each 
of those powerful actresses was so intent on her 
rendering of the principal woman in the play that 
she gave no great pains to the presentation of the 
play as a whole — perhaps, indeed, did not under- 
stand it. 

Curiously enough, a theatrical critic of great 
ability showed not long ago how one may readily 
see one thing so well that he sees others very ill 
or not at all. " In the discussions the play first 
called down upon us," he remarked on seeing Mrs. 



SUDERMANN 71 

Fiske as Magda, " it was assumed that it dealt 
with the question of parental authority. ... It 
was also assumed that it dealt with the problem 
of the new woman. ... I wish to suggest that 
this view is very short-sighted. Beneath the 
transitory details of the play it seems to me that 
there is a motive which is eternal." Certainly 
there is, and the only thing noteworthy in this 
remark is that it is a suggestion resulting from 
" a growing suspicion." While seeing Duse and 
Bernhardt and Mrs. Fiske, the suspicion grew 
upon his mind that this play was not the exploita- 
tion of a current " problem," but that it had a 
motive of eternal interest. At first he missed the 
real things in the play. That may have been 
because he was a theatrical critic, and naturally 
most interested in the acting. But Magda is not 
the only character in the play; she is the most 
brilliant, but probably the pastor, Heffterdingt, 
was the author's chief effort. And the play is 
not specifically about the new woman and parental 
authority. It presents to us, as " Die Ehre " 
does, the contrast between the provincial life and 
the big world. It shows us, as " Sodom's Ende " 
does, the conflict between the quiet virtues of home 
and the brilliant temptations of art. It shows us, 
as " Es lebe das Leben " does, the difference be- 
tween fulfilling one's own personality and follow- 



72 SUDERMANN 

ing the normal and narrow ideas of duty. Nor 
is that all; it does show us paternal authority, 
but that is only the German form taken by the 
constant difference between the older generation 
and the newer. It does show us the new woman, 
but that is only a current form of the difference 
between new ideas and conservatism or conven- 
tionalism, as you may choose to call it. In one 
situation as a focus are all these lines of life. Nor 
is it in the situation only — the return of the 
brilliant prodigal daughter — that these motives 
are implicit. They are everywhere indicated in 
the lines of the characters. 

" Modern ideas," says the old soldier, " oh, 
pshaw! I know them. But come into the quiet 
homes where are bred brave soldiers and virtuous 
wives. There you'll hear no talk about heredity, 
no arguments about individuality, no scandalous 
gossip. There modern ideas have no foothold, for 
it is there that the life and the strength of the 
Fatherland abide. Look at this home! There is 
no luxury, — hardly even what you call good taste, 
— faded rugs, birchen chairs, old pictures; and 
yet, when you see the beams of the western sun 
pour through the white curtains, and lie with such 
a loving touch on the old room, does not something 
say to you, ' Here dwells true happiness ? ' " 

And when Magda looks about her, " Every- 



SUDERMANN 73 

thing's just the same," says she. " Not a speck of 
dust has moved." And her mother answers, solic- 
itously, " I hope that you won't find any specks 
of dust." 

And when Magda speaks to her sister, " Come 
here — close — tell me the truth — has it never en- 
tered your mind to cast this whole network of pre- 
caution and respect away from you, and to go 
with the man you love out and away — anywhere — 
it doesn't matter much — and as you lie quietly on 
his breast, to hurl back a scornful laugh at the 
whole world which has sunk behind you ? " 

" No, Magda," says Marie, " I never feel so." 

One might copy out pages of quotations, so 
remarkable is the way in which the action of char- 
acter upon character brings out motives that are 
vital. I will confess that I hardly know whether 
all this is precisely what one would call dramatic. 
But that is something that must be put aside for 
the moment. 

These things should touch people deeply. They 
are not merely interesting problems. Few of us 
ever consider the problem of the new woman or 
of parental authority with the idea of finding any 
answer to it. But here is a home with good things 
and stupid things and silly things, doubtless, as 
many other homes have, and to it comes this glori- 
ous outcast who has not been feeding on swine's 



74 SUDERMANN 

husks, but has reached fame and acquired fortune 
and wealth and an immense retinue. In just that 
form we shall probably never know that motive, 
but every man whose wife and daughters are con- 
stantly in the world of society, and every woman 
whose husband spends his evenings at the club, and 
whose boy goes out on the streets, will be able to 
feel it. And so it is with the rest. As problems, 
we have no earthly concern with them. In the 
special forms which they take in Sudermann's 
plays we have not much to do with them, and often 
nothing at all, but essentially we know them and 
can respond to them. 

And that the drama can present them is evident 
from these plays. That they are essentially dra- 
matic material is another matter; it would seem 
as if the novel gave a wider opportunity. Suder- 
mann is a novelist as well as a dramatist, and an 
exceptionally powerful one. I am not familiar 
with all his works, but in " Frau Sorge " — the 
best known of his novels on this side the water — 
it certainly appears that he does not use the ad- 
vantage that he seems to have to present largely 
and fully the dominating currents of human life. 
Instead of so doing he seems to narrow his grasp 
to one powerful motive. It may be that the novel- 
ist, who must work so much by description where 
the dramatist can work by presentation, the 



SUDERMANN 75 

temptation is to confine oneself. However that be 
— and it is no present business of mine — the im- 
pression of Sudermann's plays is certainly that of 
a world of active impulses and of human figures 
living and moving therein. 

It has been said, however, and perhaps it seems 
obvious, that Sudermann's dramatic theme is " in 
all his pieces the one single conflict in which free 
personality stands with the exactions of society," 
and that " he never allows it to be doubtful that 
he stands on the side of personality and that he is 
a champion of its rights." If this were the case, 
it would take away the chief element of his power. 
It is true that not a few dramatists in Germany 
as well as elsewhere, and other men of letters as 
well as dramatists, have presented of late the 
rights of personality as against the pretensions 
of society or some kind of society. It has always 
been a favourite motive, for artists are always 
men of personality, and they are apt enough to 
present its claims. But in the present generation 
the idea has been more common than before. " To 
live one's own life " has become one of the catch- 
words of modern literature. Merely among 
modern German dramatists we can see the motive 
in Hauptmann and in Max Halbe, in each very 
tellingly presented, and we can see it also in Suder- 
mann. But I cannot think that it is his only dra- 



76 SUDERMANN 

matic theme, even his pre-eminent interest. It 
occurs in his plays, but always in connection with 
other motives. In " Die Ehre " there is no doubt 
that Robert and Leonora resolve finally to rescue 
themselves from a world in which they cannot 
draw moral breath. Graf Trast, too, had long 
ago emancipated himself from the follies under 
which he had grown up, and in the play he appears 
as the representative of freedom of thought 
against the conventional correctness of social eti- 
quette. And Sudermann here is on the side of 
those who honour duty more than the arbitrary 
dictum of society, as poets and sane-minded people 
have been for a good while. But poor, silly little 
Alma in the play is also a disciple of personality: 
she also wants to live her own life as much as any 
girl who went into a shop instead of a family be- 
cause she wanted freedom. She wants to do as 
she pleases and is bored to death with the restric- 
tions which her grave brother's ideas of decency 
would lay upon her. And with Alma the author 
shows no more sympathy than one would naturally 
have for a charming and wrong-headed young 
woman. 

Nor in his next play was he particularly the 
champion of personality. The idea, the antith- 
esis, is more important in " Sodom's Ende " than 
it is in some other plays, but I should not call it 



SUDERMANN 77 

the main motive. Willy Janikow is a man of per- 
sonality; but what is the society with which he is 
in conflict? He is not in conflict with the society 
which purchases his picture and prevents his paint- 
ing any other; if he were, Sudermann might be 
" on his side and fighting for his rights." The 
society that he is in conflict with is the society 
represented by the household of his father and 
mother, and for his conflict with this society 
Sudermann does not ask the support of our sym- 
pathy. 

In " Heimat " there need be no question that the 
idea of personality is pre-eminent; the very fact 
that so many great actresses have liked the part 
of Magda shows that clearly enough. But though 
Magda is the protagonist of personality in its 
strife against the demands of society, yet even here 
we cannot say that Sudermann leaves no doubt as 
to his own opinion. So far as the drama is con- 
cerned he has no opinion : he lets each person speak 
as he ought and do what he naturally would do. 
But the play throws its weight as much on the side 
of society in the person of Pastor Heffterdingt as 
it does on the side of personality as represented by 
Magda. And wherever Suderman be champion he 
allows nobility to the words of the pastor. 

Magda. " And your calling — does not that 
bring joy enough? 



78 SUDERMANN 

Pastor. Yes, thank God, it does. But if one 
takes it sincerely, he cannot well live his own life 
in it. . . At least I cannot. One cannot exult 
in the vigour of his personality — that is what 
you mean, is it not ? And then, I look into so many 
hearts — and one sees there too many wounds that 
one cannot heal, ever to be very blithe." 

If Sudermann hold a brief for personality, he is 
a very honourable opponent and allows the cham- 
pions of duty and of the rights of society a very 
fair chance. Even in despondency the Pastor is 
fine, as when he says to the woman who rejected him 
long before : " Yes, I have had to deaden much 
within my soul. My peace is as the peace of a 
corpse." 

In fact, as one reads the play undominated by 
the power of some great actress, one may readily 
feel that Sudermann is the spokesman for a well- 
ordered life in common rather than for anarchy. 
In fact, that gave the play its name. 

When we come to " Es lebe das Leben " there 
we need not deny that the main theme is the right 
of personality and there without doubt Suder- 
mann gives us an idea of his position in the figure 
of Beate. And here he gives us the idea that there 
are natures that have some excuse for transcending 
social law. Still this is but one play : it was from 
a criticism of it that I drew the remark quoted 



SUDERMANN 79 

above, and I fancy that the influence of this par- 
ticular piece was enough to colour a little the crit- 
ic's recollection. 

Sudermann does not carry a brief for individ- 
uality as his chief stock in trade. That is one of 
the things that I like about him. Hauptmann 
rather does so, but Sudermann's view of life is 
much larger than one motive merely, and it is that 
which gives the exhilaration to the reading of his 
plays, for it is only the self-absorbed mind that 
views the world as a struggle between personality 
and society. One can certainly analyse the matter 
so that it looks as if it were. For instance, one 
antagonism that appears often in Sudermann's 
plays, because it appears often in life, is the oppo- 
sition between old and young, between one genera- 
tion and the next. It is one of the commonest 
causes of misunderstanding. And to the young 
man or the young woman this matter looks as if it 
were the great case of Personality vs. Society. But 
it rarely is. The young man only thinks that he 
wars with society because society is represented in 
his mind by the precepts and powers of the elder 
generation. If the children could get the upper 
hand, as in " Lilliput Levee," our individualist 
would find that everybody was on his side, and that 
he could live his own life as much as he wished, if 
it did not interfere with anybody else. The two 



80 SUDERMANN 

oppositions are based on quite different sets of 
fact. The antagonism of personality to society 
is one of the feelings absolutely necessary to the 
preservation of individual life, namely of life itself. 
The very fact that a man must feed himself first 
before he can be of use to society shows that there 
must be something of this self-assertive element. 
In some natures it will be more powerful, in some 
less; there will never be an agreement for it or 
against it. But the opposition between the older 
and the younger generation is a wholly different 
feeling and arises, so far as the older generation 
is concerned, from the conservatism that grows on 
a man as he grows older, from the increase in wis- 
dom and knowledge of results, and from a lack 
of sympathy that comes v partly from a poor mem- 
ory and partly from absorption in work. Given 
these characteristics of mankind as it grows older 
and given also progress in the world, then you must 
have opposition of some sort between those who 
are just coming on the stage and those who are 
already there. In just the same way we could see 
that the motive of personality in strife with so- 
ciety combines easily with other motives which 
Sudermann observes in the world and presents in 
his plays. But they are not all one motive; they 
are many : probably more than I have noted. 
What can we say is the effect of such motives, 



SUDERMANN 81 

how is it with us when we have them impressed 
strongly upon us? Is it not exactly the effect of 
the tragic figure? The great tragic figure affects 
us as the tragedy of Rome affected Lord Byron. 
" What are our woes and suff ranee ? " By com- 
parison with great misfortunes of general appeal 
and nobly born, our own griefs and miseries and 
complaints against fortune calm down for a time. 
But here is something different. Sudermann has 
no great tragic figures — at least not in these 
plays. Willy Janikow, it is true, expires at the 
last moment, but we feel that it is only the neces- 
sary result of all that we have seen, nor is he ever 
presented in such a way as to rouse all our sym- 
pathy. In " Heimat," Magda does not die at all : 
she probably goes back to her brilliant life. It is 
the old Colonel who dies, full of years, retired from 
active work, as ready to go as any of us. Beate 
is a tragic figure, but as such rather an excep- 
tion. 

Sudermann's power is not the power of tragedy 
as is M. Rostand's. He makes a powerful im- 
pression, but it is stimulating rather than calm- 
ing, possibly intellectual rather than emotional, on 
the whole. Here is life, we say, complex, conflict- 
ing in its currents, unharmonious. It takes a man 
to keep afloat and pointed in the right direction. 
And with that we straighten up a bit (morally) 



82 SUDERMANN 

and take a little more credit to ourselves for our 
handling of such a matter. Then when a tight nip 
comes we can regard the matter a little better from 
the eye of reason. If it be one thing to perceive 
the truth of the artist and another to be moved by 
his power as a dramatist, Sudermann gives us 
chiefly opportunities for the former. The latter 
is not wanting in our experience of his work, any 
more than it is with a good many other lesser men 
who write plays. But it is in the former direction 
that he is pre-eminent. 



PINERO 

I shall never, in all probability, be one to deny 
that Mr. Pinero is a consummate playwright. As 
to whether he be a great dramatist, whether his 
plays be literature, whether he can be said to offer 
to the world a " criticism of life," whether he have 
a message — these are points on which I can imag- 
ine some discussion, can imagine even taking part 
in it, but I cannot readily think of a dispute as to 
his craftsmanship in stage technique. 

One reason for this, I am willing to admit, is 
that I have but a very hazy idea as to what stage 
technique is. Mr. Howells — who, to be sure, will 
not be accepted as authority by all who are learned 
on this point — Mr. Howells, or at least one of his 
characters, says in " The Story of a Play " that 
there is no such thing. They talk about a know- 
ledge of the stage," says Maxwell, " as if it were 
a difficult science, instead of a very simple piece of 
mechanism whose limitations and possibilities any 
one may seize at a glance. All that their know- 
ledge of it comes to is claptrap, pure and simple. 
They brag of its resources, and tell you the car- 



84 PINERO 

penter can do anything you want nowadays, but if 
you attempt anything outside of their tradition, 
they are frightened. They think that their exits 
and entrances are great matters and that they 
must come on with such a speech, and go off with 
another ; but it is not of the least importance how 
they come or go, if they have something interest- 
ing to say or do." So the disappointed playwright 
to his admiring wife. I have never been quite sure 
whether that were Mr. Howells' own view or merely 
the result of his observation of literary men who 
write for the stage. I presume it may be the lat- 
ter. I have a considerable interest in stage tech- 
nique and would enjoy of all things having its fine 
points exhibited to me by one who knew. But the 
professors of that science whom I have known have 
always seemed rather too general and glittering 
for my academic mind to follow them. I notice of 
stagecraft, however, that it is esteemed of great 
importance on one side of the footlights and of 
none at all on the other. In this respect it some- 
what resembles the technique of painting, as Mr. 
Henry Arthur Jones pointed out a year or so ago 
in the Nineteenth Century, although he grounds 
his opinion on very different reasons. 

I know of no good treatise on the subject, and 
it is, in fact, rather hard to find out just what play- 
wrights and actors consider the really important 



PINERO 85 

things in the plays they present. I have noticed 
one or two little things that may serve to give 
something of a notion. In Miss Clara Morris's 
very interesting " Life on the Stage " are one or 
two bits of mention of the actor's art, of which 
the following is the most suggestive: 

" Mr. Daly wanted me to get across the stage, 
so that I should be out of hearing distance of two 
of the gentlemen . . . [There were many ex- 
pedients for crossing, but none pleased Mr. 
Daly, until Miss Morris suggested a smelling- 
bottle] . . . He brightened quickly — clouded 
over even more quickly : ' Y-e-e-s ! N-o-o ! at least 
if it had never appeared before. But let me see — 
Miss Morris, you must carry that smelling-bottle 
in the preceding scene — and, yes, I'll just put in 
a line in your part, making you ask some one to 
hand it to you — that will nail attention to it, you 
see! Then in this scene, when you leave these 
people and cross the room to get your smelling- 
bottle from the mantel, it will be a perfectly nat- 
ural action on your part, and will give the men a 
chance of explanation and warning.' " 

Notice that new line in her part, — that shows 
necessities and possibilities which Shakespeare did 
not have to consider. Not so with the following, 
which comes from an interview granted by Mr. 
Stephen Phillips to a newspaper man: 



86 PINERO 

" When I read ' Herod ' to [Mr. Beerbohm] 
Tree, he was at the outset bored, sceptical, and 
wanted nothing so much as to get through with it. 
Gradually he grew more and more interested and 
excited, until I came to the passage where trum- 
pets are heard in the distance. ' Ha ! ' he said to 
his secretary, 6 you see the reason of that? ' Then 
he turned to me, and said : ' Have you ever been on 
the stage ? ' He did not know I had ever been an 
actor, but he divined it in that one touch." So far 
Mr. Phillips in the interview: the interviewer, 
R. D. B., continues, " I repeat that if it had not 
been for his intimate knowledge of stagecraft, his 
career as a playwright might have been cut short 
right then and there, for Beerbohm Tree vows 
that it was just this thing that made him accept 
the young man as a coming great poet." 

The last remark, if true, throws floods of light 
upon our question, as well as upon Mr. Tree's 
capabilities as a critic of poetry. 

Of this sort of stagecraft, I fancy Mr. Pinero 
must be a master, of the things belonging wholly 
to the stage and necessary to make a play go ; the 
thousand and one little things, which, if they are 
perfect, no one notices. Of course the smelling- 
bottle and the trumpets are merely accidents ; they 
may even never have existed; but they serve to 
illustrate a kind of thing that is obviously of im- 






PINERO 87 

portance in any art, even though it is rarely un- 
derstood, quite naturally, by a majority of those 
who enjoy that art. We need no more inquire into 
it than into the details of an actor's make-up. 

Of a more important kind of stagecraft, too, — 
which can be dimly perceived even by one so stage- 
blind as a literary critic, — Mr. Pinero is a master. 
The management of incidents and events so as to 
bring out strongly and rightly the situations and 
the characters — of this art Pinero is master as well 
as of the other. I have generally considered the 
best example of his skill to be the moment in " The 
Profligate " when Janet Preece sees Dunstan Ren- 
shaw and Lord Dangers, but perhaps something 
from " Letty " will be better remembered. In the 
third act of that play Mr. Letchmere (excellent 
name — a corruption probably of Lechmore) and 
his sister are good representatives of a fine old 
crusted family who are beginning to get afraid of 
themselves as being a little too representative. 
Each is engaged in an affair that shows signs of 
going a bit too far. Mrs. Crosbie resolves to 
break hers off; there is to be a good-bye dinner 
with Coppy, the future co-respondent ; and she in- 
vites to it her brother, who is devotedly fond of her, 
begging him to stick to her that evening and see 
that she does not get a chance to be run away with 
by her emotions, and Coppy. So he does : he dines 



88 PINERO 

with them and they have a very pleasant little 
dinner, and then just as they are about to leave 
the restaurant, it appears that the room is to be 
taken by Mr. Mandeville, who is celebrating his 
engagement to Letty. Now Letty is the young 
lady with whom Mr. Letchmere has been carrying 
on: it was rather supposed that he was not going 
to see her again, now that she was about to marry 
nicely " in her own class." He does, however, see 
her, is asked to stay a moment for a glass of wine, 
does so, arranges to run away with her, but for the 
moment neglects his sister, who grasps the oppor- 
tunity of being herself. That seems to me excel- 
lent. The forces that move these people are inex- 
orable. Letchmere loves his sister and wants her 
to be better than he, an absolutely necessary ele- 
ment in family feeling. He will do anything for 
her to make her so, — anything except not loving 
some one else's sister. So that situation is excel- 
lent. So is the next. Having persuaded Letty to 
leave her awful fiance for him, and while very hap- 
pily planning with her a delightf ul future, he sud- 
denly learns that the expected has happened: his 
sister has flown or rather flitted. He loves his 
sister, certainly, but he feels strongly that she is 
in a manner disgraced. In the momentary softness 
of heart, Letty recovers herself and regains terra 
firma. She subsequently marries " in her own 



PINERO 89 

class " and is very happy. Letchmere, I am afraid, 
goes to the dogs. It takes time to tell these com- 
plicated things, but they are certainly fine pieces 
of work. 

Or take the second act of " Iris " — the end of 
it — another masterpiece in its kind. Maldonado 
has left Iris his cheque-book, which she scorns to 
use, though she does not give it back. But an old 
friend in trouble appeals to her ; Iris wants money 
to help her out and signs a cheque. She is in fact 
drawn into the power of Maldonado by her very 
generosity; that almost certain quality in easy, 
pleasure-loving characters, sometimes the only re- 
deeming quality, delivers her over to her enemy. 
Surely that is very good because, though a pre- 
arranged matter of detail, it is founded on human 
nature. 

But to get away from these matters of stage- 
craft or even dramatic art, matters that I must 
ever handle gingerly, to another subject that now 
and then comes up, namely Mr. Pinero as a man of 
letters. Not long ago I saw an article on the edi- 
torial page of an influential journal, which began 
by saying that " another literary " artist had " un- 
dertaken to reunite literature and the stage, whose 
divorce has been so open and so dogmatically de- 
creed by the melodramatists." This interested me : 
I had heard talk of the divorce, although I had 



90 PINERO 

not known that it was the melodramatists who had 
pronounced the decree, and I was glad to hear of 
the reconciliation which the article went on to 
speak of as almost if not possibly quite successful. 
It seemed a good deal for one single work to ac- 
complish and I became curious about it. The lit- 
erary artist in question was Mrs. Craigie or John 
Oliver Hobbes (I'm sure I don't know which to call 
her — or him; it's very awkward about the pro- 
nouns,) and the means of reconciliation was " The 
Ambassador," which subsequently appeared in 
print. 

I thought it rather strange that John Oliver 
Hobbes should be spoken of as a leader, as one of 
the very few men of letters who had had to do with 
the theatre. But I found that the article drew 
the line pretty sharply, for it appeared later that 
" Dumas and Pinero are almost the only men who 
take a high grade of literary art to the theatre." 
I think this must surely have been before " Cyrano 
de Bergerac," and certainly before its author had 
been elected to the Academy. Still, even then it 
seems to leave out a good many. 

But, after all, what is a " literary play " ? 
What is meant by " taking literary art to the 
theatre "? I don't know anything else to say, just 
now, except that a literary play is one that can be 
printed in a book and read with satisfaction by a 



PINERO 91 

cultivated person ; namely, some one like oneself. I 
do not see that much can be said beyond that. The 
fact that a man is or is not professionally con- 
nected with the theatre has nothing to do with it. 
Moliere was an actor, Lessing a dramatic critic, 
Sheridan a manager ; yet they contributed to liter- 
ature much more, so far as the drama is concerned, 
than Voltaire, Klopstock, and Addison, who were 
distinctly men of letters. 

It may seem foolish to say that a literary play is 
one that is printed in a book. Still there can be 
no doubt that there have been plays, even " liter- 
ary plays," which never made a part of literature 
simply because they were never printed. People 
saw them, liked them perhaps, and forgot them: 
and there was an end of it. But if you print your 
play and can get the right people to read it, then 
it becomes literature, in the sense, of course, that 
a great deal else becomes literature. Now a good 
many of Mr. Pinero's plays have been printed, so 
here we have a topic that may readily be dis- 
cussed. 

Mr. Pinero has written a great many plays and 
those of different kinds. " The Magistrate " is a 
delightful farce ; " Sweet Lavender " is an attract- 
ive idyll. But Mr. Pinero's claim to consideration 
is not founded on farces or idylls : he is thought of 
especially as having written " "the Second Mrs. 



92 PINERO 

Tanqueray " and a number of other so-called 
" problem-plays." Mr. Brander Matthews' se- 
vere reprehension of M. Rostand could never be 
made of Mr. Pinero. Whatever be the case about 
a criticism of life, he certainly is supposed to 
present problems ; whether he be really influenced 
or not by Ibsen or Dumas, he has some character- 
istics that remind us of them. What may be said 
of him from this standpoint? 

I do not care for the term " problem-play." 
It may be a convenient expression for a play that 
presents a problem, but certainly it is inelegant; 
one would never speak of an adventure play, a his- 
tory play, a manners play. But more funda- 
mentally the term is at fault because problems as 
such are not especially good subjects for plays. 
Plays deal with life, and life does not consist very 
largely of problems. The sociologist and the leg- 
islator deal with problems, but the average man 
or woman has not much to do with them save as 
an interesting intellectual exercise. We are all 
concerned with living, doubtless, but living does 
not involve many problems, save of a very practi- 
cal nature, as how to manage a small income or 
how to bring up one's children or how to carry on 
one's business or how to settle one's religion or 
politics. Otherwise the main thing is how to carry 
out an ideal which forms itself within us, not by 



PINERO 93 

the resolution of problems generally, but in much 
more subtle ways. And even if problems were a 
current factor in life, a play would be a poor place 
for the exploiting them. A novelist may perhaps 
deal with problems, for he has space in which to 
argue them pro and con, but arguments are not 
very interesting to listen to. 

Nor if problems were a fair test of the play- 
wright, would Mr. Pinero fare very well. He does 
not, so far as I know, present himself as a problem- 
solver, but suppose for a moment that he did. 
What are his problems ? " The Second Mrs. Tan- 
queray " presents possibly the problem, " How can 
a woman with a past become a woman without a 
past ? " This problem clearly has the simple an- 
swer that she cannot do it at all, to which it may 
be added that no one else can either, by means 
observable on the stage. " The Profligate " seems 
to raise the novel problem, " Is it a good plan to 
marry a rake to reform him ? " " The Notorious 
Mrs. Ebbsmith " has what is really more of a 
question, " Can a man and woman live together as 
intellectual companions? " which, however, is a 
matter that sensible people (not reformers) will 
not spend much time upon. So I do not feel that 
Mr. Pinero's problems would make him more 
worthy of attention than various other dramatists. 

Even if he had problems, however, they would 



94 PINERO 

not make plays. A good play generally gives us 
some action that in its condensed dramatic form 
will move us somehow, be an active factor in our 
thinking and feeling; it gives us some character 
often typical of an idea, or of something that we 
are thinking about. By virtue of being a play it 
may be able to burn these things in upon our mem- 
ories. " Macbeth " gives us the wages of sin in 
the form of death to the finer life and finally of the 
death of the body. " Hamlet " gives us the man 
of thought in the world of action. Here Mr. 
Pinero might have something to give us. If he 
have anything to say, being a master of stage art, 
he should be able to create some figure typical of 
some great element in life, some action or situation 
which gathers into a focus some great experience. 
I fear he does not do so. His shady ladies soon 
become very shadowy in the mind. The solutions 
to his " problems " are like that of Alexander over 
the Gordian knot. " When Mr. Pinero essayed to 
write plays such as these, dealing with the deepest 
problems of life," writes a recent critic, " he chal- 
lenged comparison not merely with the world of 
dramatists, but with the world of thinkers." It 
is going rather far to call Mr. Pinero's problems 
the deepest of life or to fancy that the world of 
thinkers has ever been very much concerned with 
them. Mr. Pinero does not make much of them, 



PINERO 95 

they do not remain with us ; they hold our attention 
while they are acting, but we soon lose them from 
mind. This is really not so much the fault of the 
thinker as of the artist. Sudermann, to take an 
example not so often trotted out as Ibsen or 
Dumas, is not a thinker, and yet " Die Ehre," 
" Sodom's Ende," " Heimat," while they do not 
offer us problems and their solutions, do offer us 
presentation of some of the great contrasts and 
contradictions of life. 

Mr. Pinero's latest plays, " Iris " and " Letty," 
will not be called problem plays by any one. " The 
Gay Lord Quex " depicts what the marquess him- 
self calls " a curious phase of modern life." So in 
an extended sense do " Iris " and " Letty." 

" The Gay Lord Quex " can hardly be one of 
those plays which we enjoy from its truth to 
nature, for few of us have had the privilege of 
knowing a social world where a man can flirt with 
a manicurist at noon and with a duchess at mid- 
night. Those who can compare the play with life 
itself will regard it as a picture of manners. But 
more broadly the interest in the play lies in the 
cleverness of the intrigue, and in a minor way in 
the character of Lord Quex himself. From the 
rather doubtful atmosphere of " establishments " 
which serve a double purpose, and Italian gardens 
and boudoirs which seem to be used for one only, 



96 PINERO 

he emerges with more credit than any one would 
imagine on his first appearance. But the real 
thing is the extreme cleverness of the turns in the 
third act, wherein the manicurist and the reformed 
rake pit themselves against each other. This is 
dramatic construction; something which I admire 
immensely when I see it and consider it imperti- 
nent to praise. 

" Iris " and " Letty " have as much construc- 
tion and more real body to them. The phases of 
life which they present are more general. If we 
do not know them, we have known others pretty 
nearly like them. And if not even that, we can see 
some pretty general principles of life upon which 
they are based. The first shows us a bit of the 
world that is dependent on pleasure. Iris and her 
friends enjoy life while they have money (whereby 
they can make others minister to their pleas- 
ures), but when they lose it, they are all at sea. 
It is true that Maldonado is a millionaire banker, 
Kane a working solicitor, and Trenwith goes to 
work out his destiny in Canada. But there is not 
much doubt that Maldonado did not work for his 
money, while Kane, of course, stole his, and as for 
Trenwith's making a competence in British Colum- 
bia in two years, we on this side the water are sim- 
ply incredulous. Poor old Croker had got to 
middle age without being useful in the world, and 



PINERO 97 

so, when he lost the money he had inherited, he 
couldn't think of anything but being a club sec- 
retary, and as for Iris herself, of course that is 
the whole play, the picture of the weak nature so 
dependent upon its luxuries that it must follow 
the easiest path to them. 

As for " Letty," it seems to me as strong a 
piece of work as anything Mr. Pinero has done. 
It presents no problem but merely an element in 
life, namely, a glimpse of a world that has run to 
seed, particularly of an old family which has kept 
its money but lost its power of behaving decently, 
or rather, perhaps, has not moved on with the rest 
of society. With this is contrasted the world in 
which Letty lives, sordid, coarse, stupid, and yet 
with the elements of happiness in it. In a way 
the play challenges comparison with " Sodom's 
Ende " and " Ghosts." It need hardly be said 
that Mr. Pinero does not burn in his idea with the 
atrocious firmness of Ibsen. And it should be said 
that he is not so convinced of the real excellence of 
good, honest, innocent life as is the German, and 
consequently cannot make his picture of it con- 
vincing to the audience. Still one follows Letty 
intently : at first it all seems disagreeable, true, 
incomprehensible, but it clears up as the play goes 
on, until finally, in the last half of the fourth act, 
the aim of the dramatist comes out clearly, and line 



98 PINERO 

after line is added with perfect definiteness and 
surety of hand. And the Epilogue, though possi- 
bly not absolutely sincere, is really the right 
thing. 

Mr. Pinero is not a thinker, a moralist, or a 
philosopher. Nor does he appear to think that he 
is. Mr. Henry Arthur Jones writes articles in the 
magazines on the function of the drama, and the 
renascence of it, and the aims and the art and the 
other things of it, but Mr. Pinero seems content to 
write plays. He does not pose as other than *a 
dramatist : his admirers may talk of his problems, 
but his own work does not give the impression that 
he takes himself or his work over seriously. His 
plays are not sermons nor polemics, they have no 
arguments and no prefaces. They are simply 
plays, and for the moment, at the theatre, they 
are remarkably good ones. 

How good they are at the theatre every one 
knows ; how good they are even to read is apparent 
when we read the works of some other successful 
playwrights, say of his predecessor Robertson. 
Robertson's comedies are in a general way not so 
very unlike Mr. Pinero's. They do not present 
problems, but that is merely because problems were 
not in fashion in the sixties. Robertson presents 
questions, and between questions and problems, so 
far as the dramatist is concerned, there is not 



PINERO 99 

much difference. Neither can be settled by a play ; 
each gives a playwright a theme which may affect 
his audience keenly. But Robertson's " School," 
for instance, — which happens to be the only one of 
his that I have at hand, — Mr. Pinero is certainly 
miles beyond that, partly because everybody is, 
but also in part because he is really more of a man 
of letters than Robertson. It is true that Mr. 
Pinero is first and foremost a man of the theatre. 
When " The Ambassador " appeared it was 
curious to compare it with " The Princess and the 
Butterfly," which came out about the same time. 
The two plays were of much the same general 
kind, comedies of character and incident, set in 
the same world, mostly in the same place, more or 
less alike in plot if not in motive. Mr. Pinero's 
play is certainly the more theatrical if you come to 
analyse it closely : everybody has something to do, 
to be sure, but often somebody has no reason for 
existing, save to do some special thing that the 
play demands. The dialogue of both plays is 
smart and showy, but Mr. Pinero's is often con- 
ventional and artificial, while in " The Ambassa- 
dor " there are often touches of nature that might 
pass unperceived on the boards. There is not 
much to choose as to the characters, but Mr. 
Pinero's are somewhat more mechanical in that 
they are all people who exhibit the motive of the 



100 PINERO 

play, show the effects of middle age, in different 
ways. One is a woman who still loves her husband, 
one a woman who chiefly loves her dinner, and so 
on, and they are not much more. But if Mr. 
Pinero is the more theatrical, it must be remem- 
bered that he is writing for the theatre. The 
theatre has its conventions, and it would be absurd 
to imagine that even to-day we could transfer a 
bit of real life from the parlour to the stage, and 
have it seem across the footlights as it seemed 
across the room. 

In the Fifth Reader, or perhaps the Fourth, 
there used to be a tale about two sculptors who 
made two statues to go up and be set on a very 
high place. The reader may remember it; one 
statue seemed coarse and rude till it got where it 
was intended to be; the other, which was very 
charming and delicate when examined down below, 
lost a good deal when it was put in place. It is the 
same thing here. Mr. Pinero knows the stage 
better than Mrs. Craigie: he is somewhat conven- 
tional and confined, but he must know the stage. 
Ladies wear rouge on the stage and put lines under 
their eyes, and do other things which would not 
render them attractive in the parlour, and so do 
the men. Some of these things about Mr. Pinero 
that we do not care for are necessary for the right 
effect across the footlights. 



PINERO 101 

And as to the other things, — the delicacies, the 
quiet touches, the delightful half-tones, — we must 
be content to miss them at the theatre. Of course 
we may mourn that these things cannot be on the 
stage, that they can get no farther than to be 
realised by the kindly imagination, that they seem 
to lose character and colour when incorporate in 
real flesh and blood. We may mourn at all this, 
but it will be without reason. Our keenest pleas- 
ures, our most delightful thrills or chuckles, do 
we really wish to share them with the multitude? 

The stage is still a public place. It is not out- 
doors and boisterous as it was with the Elizabeth- 
ans, but still it is not exactly a place for intima- 
cies. Let us be content to have our poetry as we 
want it, to ourselves at home, and on the stage to 
have what the stage can give us, effective figures 
which will live in our minds, effective situations 
which will sum up whole developments, effective 
actions which will typify whole experiences. These 
things can doubtless be gained otherwise; books 
and pictures often give them to us. But nowhere 
do we get them with the same force of impression 
as on the stage, for the stage has a hundred means 
of directing, concentrating, focussing what life 
spreads out at large, upon one spot of our atten- 
tion. 



BERNARD SHAW 

It is hard to take Mr. Bernard Shaw seriously, 
for he has such a gift of wit and paradox that he 
is apt to seem desirous of appearing frivolous. It 
is hard also to write about him, for he has written 
a good deal about himself much more cleverly than 
most people have written about him. He has a 
much better knowledge of the subject and a 
superior gift of expression. Yet the attempt must 
be made, for he really is serious in the main. He 
wishes to accomplish something worth while and 
he will do so, too, or do something in the direction. 
If one cannot get into touch with him, then so 
much the worse for oneself. 

I was about to begin by saying that Mr. Shaw 
was not so much a master of stagecraft as some 
other people. Just then, however, I saw in a paper 
that a distinguished Shawian actor affirmed him 
to be greater in dramatic construction than 
Shakespeare. That made me pause. It is true 
that the remark was made at the University of 
Chicago, an institution whence newspaper report 
is apt to offer us matter much more highly col- 
102 



BERNARD SHAW 103 

oured than the original: still such may have been 
the opinion of the actor in question. I do not, 
however, believe that it is Mr. Shaw's. Mr. Shaw 
himself says somewhere, with his usual candour 
and even modesty, that he is not remarkable for 
stage technique. His plays, he seems to think, 
are technically like other plays. He says that he 
is better than Shakespeare in one respect, and here 
not a few will probably agree with him, but does 
not claim superiority in the matter of stage con- 
struction. There is not very much point in the 
comparison. Shakespeare made his plays for his 
own theatre, which was very different from ours, 
and much of his absolute stage technique is to-day 
impossible. Take the fifteen scenes (more or less) 
in the third act of " Antony and Cleopatra," and 
in the fourth; that is something out of the ques- 
tion now, and so it is with some other matters. In 
a large way I suppose Shakespeare had more dra- 
matic art than Mr. Shaw; certainly he managed 
to write more plays that did and do well on the 
stage. 

But stagecraft is not Mr. Shaw's particularly 
strong point, although, like most literary men who 
write plays, he seems to be well settled in the 
opinion that he knows quite enough about the 
matter for practical purposes. It may be 
doubted, however, whether his work is especially 



104 BERNARD SHAW 

well fitted for the stage. He can write, I sup- 
pose, almost anything, and he has written a dozen 
plays. Some of them have appeared on the stage, 
and that with a greater or less success for the 
time. But a determined criticism would probably 
show that their success was due not so much to 
their dramatic character as to something else. 

Mr. Shaw's real matter of importance is not 
his dramatic art, but his ideas or his way of think- 
ing. He is a critic and a dramatist, it is true, 
but at bottom he is a Radical, a Revolutionist, a 
Socialist, I believe. His plays may be successful 
as plays, and he is naturally pleased or displeased, 
but the real root of the matter is in the ideas. In 
fact, I suppose his ideas rather interfere with his 
success as a playwright, because they prevent his 
taking the stage seriously. He says that he did 
not at first, and results would seem to show that 
he did not afterwards. He generally cast his 
plays " in the ordinary practical comedy form in 
use in all the theatres," but we may infer that 
he could with equal ease have cast them in any 
other form; indeed, his later plays have been of 
various kinds. 

It seems not unnatural that when a man has 
mainly at heart the exploitation of some idea or 
conception, and considers the dramatic part of 
the business of minor importance, he will not be 



BERNARD SHAW 105 

a pre-eminent success on the stage. The actor 
considers the acting and the stage management of 
immense importance, and the ideas of very little 
or none at all, and even he does not always suc- 
ceed. 

It would certainly not be worth while to at- 
tempt to present a boiling down of Mr. Shaw's 
ideas. For one thing his object in writing is gen- 
erally to express them, which he does commonly 
much better than I should be able to. But, for 
another thing, he has so many ideas. He is, and 
for a long time has been, a champion of a dif- 
ferent order of society, and as such has not only 
had many good ideas of his own, but he has ex- 
pressed them excellently and very amusingly. Add 
to that all the ideas that he has imputed to Wag- 
ner, Ibsen, Nietzsche, and you have far too many 
for a short essay. But still it will be worth 
making a try at the general nature and character 
of his ideas as presented in his plays, or at least 
of his dramatic character. 

Mr. Shaw has published eleven plays. Of these 
" Widowers' Houses " deals with the position of a 
man who lives on money used by somebody else in 
ways he cannot approve. This is a pretty im- 
portant matter in modern life: it brings in what 
may really be a problem to many. So many 
people nowadays — I suppose it was so always — 



106 BERNARD SHAW 

live on the work of others, that it is rather im- 
portant to know how the money is employed which 
gets your bread and butter. " Mrs. Warren's 
Profession " presents a girl whose mother has 
educated her with money made in a peculiarly dis- 
honourable manner. This is not so common a 
case; the particular manner brings up various 
phases of the question which are so special that 
the general nature of the problem is largely lost. 
" The Philanderers," which is called an " unpleas- 
ant play," has no definite problem, but is more a 
satire on what used to be called the " new woman." 
These ideas we need not discuss: they are but 
special forms taken by the general motive power 
of Mr. Shaw's thinking. 

It is with Mr. Shaw as with most men: you will 
best get at them when they are not dead set on 
some special object. " Arms and the Man " has 
no special target, and for that reason, perhaps, 
it was more successful on the stage than Mr. 
Shaw's earlier pieces. Taking as a setting the 
vague possibilities for romance offered by Servia 
and Bulgaria, Mr. Shaw calmly produces a 
strictly realistic play. He presents the world as 
it is — not especially in Servia or Bulgaria, for I 
suppose he has no especial knowledge of those 
countries — but the world in general, and creates 
a very amusing satire. It is a satire, and it is 



BERNARD SHAW 107 

amusing, but it has enough hits at truth to be a 
little more than that. Mr. Shaw gets everybody 
off their high horses — the soldier, the gentleman, 
the romantic young lady — we see and acknow- 
ledge the various pretences and affectations of life 
as we have often done before. Mr. Shaw wishes to 
get at the real facts, the real springs of action, 
but he does not get much farther than others have 
done. That, I suppose, was the reason that 
" Arms and the Man " was not more successful 
on the stage than it was. Its object was satire 
but not very vigorous satire, nor on very new 
lines. It was more quaint, I should say, than 
anything else. Still, beside its particular satire, 
it has plenty of touches which show the more gen- 
eral purpose of the man. In the first act, where 
the Servian soldier has sought refuge in the room 
of the Bulgarian young lady, we see constantly 
that we are to have the real thing, tinctured with 
epigram, it is true, but still nearer the real thing 
than melodrama. 

" Some soldiers," says Raina scornfully, " are 
afraid of death." 

" All of them, dear lady," answers the man, 
" all of them, believe me. It is our duty to live 
as long as we can, and kill as many of the enemy 
as we can." 

There is satire and epigram there, but there is 



108 BERNARD SHAW 

also a certain sort of reality and great reason- 
ableness. There is plenty of it. " Bless you, 
dear lady," says the man, " you can always tell 
an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and 
cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols, 
the old ones grub." It may or may not be so, but 
at any rate it is a resolute doing away of conven- 
tional romance, of the romance of pictures and 
books and so on, for the reasonable view which is 
willing to make an effort after the facts. It need 
not be that Mr. Shaw knows as much of what real 
soldiers actually are as Mr. Kipling. That par- 
ticularity is rather beside his purpose : his especial 
aim is to open our eyes now and then to the im- 
possibility of carrying through half the notions 
that have grown up in the minds of every one from 
books and pictures and superficial talk, mingled 
with our own childish imagination and self-centred 
desire. That sort of thing will not stand the test 
of experience; people are always coming to grief 
by depending upon it; better open one's eyes and 
interpret what one really sees by a little common 
sense. 

When you have your mind set on this sort of 
thing it must be hard to think of doing anything 
else. I think it is remarkable that Mr. Shaw 
should have any dramatic construction at all. I 
remember nothing of it in " Arms and the Man," 



BERNARD SHAW 109 

which is, all the same, one of the cleverest and most 
amusing plays that one reads. I am sorry to say 
that I never saw it, but I suspect that it does not 
make quite so much difference as with some other 
plays. 

"You Never Can Tell" is another delightful 
play. It is on the face of it more frivolous and, 
indeed, more impossible, if one may say so, than 
" Arms and the Man," but it is full of the same 
sort of eye-openers as the other, and in the pas- 
sages between Valentine and Gloria it begins to 
get quite close to some of Mr. Shaw's later 
heresies. That delightful waiter, too, — I'm sure 
he would have made an Admirable Crichton if he 
had had half a chance. Let us get on, however, 
to " Candida," for that is, I take it, the best of 
Mr. Shaw's plays, and certainly it is the one that 
most people will happen to have in mind now, 
unless perhaps " Man and Superman " be eviscer- 
ated and exposed on the stage some time in the 
winter. 

" Candida " carries the process of eye-opening, 
so dear to Mr. Shaw, one step farther than " Arms 
and the Man." First we have the Rev. James 
Morell, a Christian Socialist, and therefore at war 
with the many evils and falsenesses of our social 
life, and intent in bringing in a good, strong, and 
honest way of life among people who are too much 



110 BERNARD SHAW 

bent on making money and enjoying themselves 
to consider carefully the ways in which they do so. 
Certainly the character is inimitably good, and 
when we think chiefly of that kind of pleasure that 
comes from seeing people and things presented in 
a perfectly natural way and with a perfectly sure 
touch, aside from what they happen to be, when 
we answer with a thrill to every certainty of por- 
trayal, and chuckle to ourselves at every small 
point of human frailty painted for us just as it 
is, why, the Reverend James appeals to us as few 
figures upon the modern stage. We have him at 
his best in the contrast with Mr. Burgess, the 
" man of sixty, made coarse by the compulsory 
selfishness of petty commerce " — there we have 
him at his best, and he makes the right impression, 
a go-ahead, clear-visioned, plain-speaking man, 
understanding the world and taking it for what it 
is. " Well," he says to his old scalawag of a 
father-in-law, " that did not prevent our getting 
on very well together. God made you what I call 
a scoundrel as he made me what you call a fool. 
... It was not for me to quarrel with his handi- 
work in the one case more than in the other. So 
long as you come here honestly as a self-respect- 
ing, thorough, convinced scoundrel, justifying 
your scoundrelism, and proud of it, you are wel- 
come. But I won't have you here snivelling about 



BERNARD SHAW 111 

being a model employer and a converted man when 
you're only an apostate with your coat turned for 
the sake of a County Council contract. No; I like 
a man to be true to himself, even in wickedness. 
Come, now; either take your hat and go, or else 
sit down and give me a good scoundrelly reason 
for wanting to be friends with me." We certainly 
have here one who sees through the shams of mod- 
ern life, and by the very clearness of his vision, 
somehow, has power to make all others feel all their 
sham pretentiousness. And as he transfixes the 
ridiculous commercialist who is trying to make 
friends with the Mammon of righteousness, we feel 
that he and we are of those in the front rank of 
progress, the men who know what is right and so 
can do it. 

And then appears Candida and her poet. He 
is, to start with, singularly and strangely frank, 
and strange and singular in other ways. As he 
and Candida drove from the station he was tor- 
mented all the time with wondering what he ought 
to give the cabman. He is not made to get along 
well in an everyday world — that is, not as the 
world considers getting on well. 

But it soon appears that the poet is there to 
show us a range of view above the Reverend James. 
A poet is a man more sensitive than the rest of 
the world, and who therefore sees more than most 



112 BERNARD SHAW 

men, and who has more power of expression and 
therefore says what he sees more exactly. James 
could of course say good things. " The over- 
paying instinct is a generous one ; better than the 
underpaying, and not so common." " No, no," 
says Eugene, " Cowardice, incompetence," which 
it often is, at least in the case of feeing, which 
was the thing they were talking about. The poet 
opens up on Morell at once, and comes out of each 
encounter on top. 

" Eugene, my boy," says the cheerful optimist, 
who has just learned from Eugene that he loves 
his wife, " you are making a fool of yourself — a 
very great fool of yourself. There's a piece of 
wholesome, plain speaking for you." 

To which Eugene answers, " Oh, do you think 
I don't know all that? Do you think that the 
things that people make fools of themselves for 
are any less real and true than the things they 
behave sensibly about? They are more true, they 
are the only things that are true." 

We cannot, perhaps, immediately understand 
such a point of view. I will confess that when 
" Morell grasps him powerfully by the lapel of 
his coat, he cowers down on the sofa and screams 
powerfully," I rather sympathised with the bigger 
man. And when Morell called him a little snivel- 
ling, cowardly whelp, and told him to go before he 



BERNARD SHAW 118 

frightened himself into a fit, I had enough red 
blood in me to agree with him. But really, of 
course, it is not anything especially to admire in 
a man that he is physically so much more power- 
ful than another that he could knock him into a 
cocked-up hat. We feel that among our own kind 
of people (whatever kind it may be) it is nice to 
be big and hearty and strong, and to feel that we 
could knock the stuffing out of this or that little 
fool of our acquaintance. But we never make the 
comparison broader and think that a good, power- 
ful steam-fitter, or a solid coal-handler, is any 
better than we because he could do us up. So 
clearly the Reverend James is not a finer fellow, 
with all the breadth of chest ; indeed, he would be 
the first to discredit the reign of brute force, in 
spite of the charms of muscular Christianity. 

In fact Marchbanks gives us a second eye-open- 
ing, and we perceive that the first was, in a meas- 
ure, deceptive. Mr. Shaw was playing with us. 
The first was too easy. It is not so much to see 
through the deceits and shams of society nowadays. 
Thackeray and Carlyle are not read by every- 
body, but their chief standpoints are pretty com- 
mon property. Indeed it is so much the fashion 
to look beneath the surface that it is not at all 
hard to take the pose. But really to know what 
is what, really to react to the facts of life, to be 



114 BERNARD SHAW 

really genuine, that is no easier than it was in 
the days of Teufelsdroeckh, or of Gulliver, or of 
Piers the Ploughman. 

Not that the Reverend James is absolutely a 
pretentious gasbag any more than Marchbanks is 
an inspired prophet. He has a definite, a positive 
part in the world's work. You cannot reform the 
world with a few epigrams ; most reformers are 
impracticable persons, which means that they can- 
not determine details, do not like to take the 
trouble to make their ideas fit complicated cases, 
are puzzled at any specific correct thinking, have 
not patience and skill absolutely to know anything, 
except a few general principles, " great laws of 
life," as their admirers subsequently call them. 
They are not the people to do the work of reform- 
ing the world; the world has to reform itself. 
But it can only be got to reform itself by mid- 
dlemen, so that the reformers have to have fol- 
lowers, commonly men who do not entirely under- 
stand them, but who get full of better ideas than 
they had before, at least, and who incite the world 
to work itself over into something a little better 
than it was before. The new ideas are handed 
around in predigested tablets, and get to be rather 
the thing. Then the original thinkers retire or 
are retired to the background, and the reign of 
talkers begins. The Rev. James Morell is a 



BERNARD SHAW 115 

typical talker. The original thinker is a dreamer 
and doesn't like to do anything. The talkers are 
commonly men of vitality who have neither the 
imagination to dream nor the patience to think for 
themselves. They want to do something in this 
world, but, having no notion of just what they 
can do, they take it out in talking. They believe 
absolutely in what they say, while they say it, and 
they rouse people to a state of excited conviction 
by the hypnotic power of their language, as Mr. 
Morell did at the meeting of the Guild of St. 
Matthew. It is these latter people, those that 
listen to the talkers, who go ahead and do the 
world's work in reforming itself; but as they are 
creatures of the emotions rather than of the in- 
tellect, they never follow people like Marchbanks 
because they do not understand them nor like 
them, but do follow people like Mr. Morell because 
they do like them and do not have to understand 
them. 

Of course Mr. Shaw is one of the Marchbankses, 
but he is not entirely without sympathy for the 
Morells. Who can be entirely without sympathy 
for them? — big, strong, hearty fellows. How 
much better it is that they should earn a living 
by talking than that they should have to hoe corn 
all day on a farm or dig dirt on a railway. They 
do more good, too. 



116 BERNARD SHAW 

In " Candida " Mr. Shaw sometimes loses the 
reformer in the dramatist. Yet he does not do so 
wholly ; he certainly shows a sympathy toward the 
end for the Reverend James which is not entirely 
consistent. Recollect that scathing description of 
his family home. " You should come with us, 
Eugene, and see the pictures of the hero of that 
household. James as a baby ! the most wonderful 
of all babies. James holding his first school prize, 
won at the ripe age of eight! James as the cap- 
tain of his eleven ! James in his first frock coat ! 
James under all sorts of glorious circumstances ! " 
That is about as bitter in its satire as we can wish : 
Mr. Shaw puts it in the mouth of the man's wife. 
That was the right thing to do, and yet he also 
allows us to feel a little sympathy for him. 

" Candida "is undoubtedly an excellent piece 
of writing, full of those flashes of reality that are 
the great thing with Mr. Bernard Shaw. People 
sometimes discuss it as a play with all seriousness ; 
ask about its problem, about the character of Can- 
dida, about the poet's secret, and such things. 
They are all beside the point. One may talk of 
them if one will, just as one may (indeed must) 
admire Miss Proserpine Garland. But the real 
thing in the play is that it gives a standpoint 
from which to view the world. 

Appreciating this, we may proceed to Mr. 



BERNARD SHAW 117 

Shaw's latest utterance, " Man and Superman," 
which I saw in the paper the other day is to be 
produced in New York shortly with notable omis- 
sions. This, perhaps, makes it unnecessary to 
write about it at present. The play has been 
written, and Mr. Shaw has also written a criticism 
upon it, so that no one else need try his hand upon 
it. There still remained the possibility of saying 
and showing either that it would do on the stage 
or that it would not. I was going to say the 
latter. But there is no use saying it now if the 
play is to be acted before this gets into print. 

" Man and Superman " is far more a play of 
idea than most of Mr. Shaw's. " Arms and the 
Man " gave us an idea of the standpoint of Mr. 
Bernard Shaw ; he was a realistic satirist. " Can- 
dida " went a step farther ; it made it clear that 
here was a realist and a satirist who was not a 
mere promulgator of everyday realism (like Bal- 
zac, say) nor of everyday satire (say Thackeray). 
Mr. Shaw, it appeared, was an entirely modern 
person, an out-and-out advocate of neo-realism. 
Neo-realism is merely the presentation of the ulti- 
mate facts of life in any way you like. In " Man 
and Superman " Mr. Shaw, having pierced to the 
secret of the ultimate development of Man from 
protoplasm to the Superman, presents it to us in 
a piece of extravagance, ostensibly in the garb of 



118 BERNARD SHAW 

to-day, with automobiles and so on, but really of 
an entirely fanciful nature. This mode of pres- 
entation is worth remarking: it is almost a note 
of Mr. Shaw's dramaturgy. The expedient is 
that of a frankly impossible motive carried out in 
a very realistic manner. " The Philanderers " 
and " You Never Can Tell " were entirely absurd 
and impossible in conception, but entirely realistic 
in execution. The other plays do not have quite 
so much of it, but there is usually some : in " Can- 
dida " the calm discussion of which man the lady 
is to go with seems almost as though Mr. Shaw 
thought it a natural proceeding, but of course it 
is not more so than having Cleopatra carried into 
Caesar's presence in a roll of carpet (I hope that 
is not historical) or having General Burgoyne 
march from Boston to Albany to meet General 
Howe. " Man and Superman " is quite as fan- 
tastic as any romantic play: the main difference 
is that it is not so interesting; the dashing across 
Europe in an automobile pursued by the girl one 
is destined to marry, and landing among a set of 
Spanish brigands, the chief of whom has been a 
waiter at the Savoy, serves as a vehicle for Mr. 
Shaw's views as well as anything else, but in itself 
it has no imaginative character, and, indeed, is 
rather a dull sort of humour. 

But the form is not a matter of great impor- 



BERNARD SHAW 119 

tance, though I wish it were really amusing as 
Mr. Shaw could have made it. The constant play 
of idea is the main thing or else the great idea 
at bottom. It is hardly necessary to say that the 
true nature of the great truth promulgated in the 
play is not easily grasped even in reading, would 
be less easily understood if the whole play were 
given on the stage, and will not be even guessed 
at if the third act is much cut. It is to the effect 
that the process of development of man into a 
higher form (the Superman) is to be carried on 
by sexual selection just as his development from 
lower forms has been, and that in this process 
women (do or should) wish to get married in order 
that they may have children, and not for any 
minor motive that fancy or romance or conven- 
tionality or policy may try to push into promi- 
nence, and that men, having been of use in this 
process, have about as much place in the economy 
of nature as a sucked orange at breakfast. That 
seems a curious idea for a play. Mr. Shaw pre- 
sents it to us by the spectacle of two young ladies, 
one of whom marries secretly and persuades the 
father of her husband not to disinherit him, and 
the other marries openly, having persuaded her 
own father before dying to place her in charge of 
the person she had singled out for that purpose. 
A slight action is given to the piece by the dash of 



120 BERNARD SHAW 

the not-yet husband across Europe In an auto- 
mobile in flight from the girl who intends to marry 
him. All the other characters come after him in 
another automobile, and all fall among comic 
brigands. 

All this circumstance appears to me to be 
pretty poor stuff, and I shall take leave of it 
merely by saying that, were it a hundred times 
poorer, the play would still be worth reading for 
the constant cleverness of the dialogue and the 
occasional seriousness of the matter conveyed. 
The theory of the play I suppose to be entirely 
false, but I have no concern with it, one way or 
the other. It gives Mr. Shaw a chance for his 
epigram, and his epigram gives us a chance at 
getting at a bit of truth now and then, or of 
thinking that we do, both of which are exhilarat- 
ing sensations. We need not swallow them all any 
more than we swallow the ocean when we go in 
swimming, — in fact, we could not do so if we tried, 
— but in the constant effort to keep intellectually 
afloat and to swim about, we find ourselves ma- 
terially invigorated and refreshed. 

This realistic brilliancy is the great thing about 
Mr. Shaw. For the moment, I think, everything 
else becomes dull and tawny beside this white light. 
Pinero seems to be the merest boy, smoking cig- 
arettes and talking of things that he knows as 



BERNARD SHAW 121 

much about as the rabbit does of the purposes of 
nature. Sudermann is evidently one who makes 
not even an effort to see beneath the crust of cus- 
tom and convention of a thousand years. Haupt- 
mann, with all his brilliancy, is merely the bright 
child who amuses you by telling how he gets the 
better (or else doesn't) of oppressive elders, a 
jam-pot rebel against meat and potatoes. Ros- 
tand is the painter of very exquisite and charming 
pictures to illustrate Jack-and-the-Beanstalk and 
other such classics. This man, on the other hand, 
has had life under his microscope and knows its 
secrets, has put himself in touch with real scien- 
tists who know the constitution of the universe, 
and who now presents to us, with the sugar coat- 
ing that we demand, a few of the ultimate facts of 
life, that we may like or dislike, understand or 
not, but which are facts. 

Such is something like the first impression that 
Mr. Bernard Shaw may fairly make on one who 
reads or sees his plays. Not that one will neces- 
sarily admire him or care about his ideas, but it 
seems very hard to deny them entirely or to get 
round them and him. You are on his side 
throughout the play, even if, when it is over, you 
are astonished to find what company you have been 
keeping. 

First impressions and second thoughts are often 



122 BERNARD SHAW 

different. They are with Mr. Shaw. First im- 
pressions will be more or less of the kind that I 
have described: second thoughts are sure to be 
anything except that. The particular change 
that comes over one in regard to Mr. Shaw is that 
his white light loses brilliancy, and perhaps goes 
out. That is to say, shortly after you have been 
decidedly under the influence of his brilliancy, his 
cleverness, his realities, you find yourself not quite 
sure just what those ideas were that so short a 
time ago seemed, if not indubitable, yet at least 
absolutely there. For this there is a twofold 
reason. 

The first is that, though he writes plays, Mr. 
Shaw does not present his ideas dramatically. 
They are as they happen to be stated in the dia- 
logue, they are what they are, that is all, — and 
enough, too, some may think. But for a drama- 
tist it is not enough. The drama has particular 
ways of giving impressions. They are very ef- 
fective ways, and they result often in powerful 
and long-continued impressions. If, however, a 
man writes plays and does not avail himself of the 
possibilities of the drama, then he gets all the 
drawbacks of the drama without its attendant 
advantages. And as a means of presenting ideas 
the drama has one serious drawback, namely, lack 
of space. The dramatist has the means of com- 



BERNARD SHAW 123 

pensating for this disadvantage, he can even turn 
it to his own purpose. He will make up for his 
lack of opportunity in statement somehow; if he 
is going to do anything, he will have action, sit- 
uation, characters to carry the thing, to make it 
stay in our mind, to serve us as tokens of the ideas. 
If we do not have this, if we merely have the people 
on the stage telling each other one thing or an- 
other, even if it be in epigrammatic dialogue, we 
shall not get any more out of it than we usually 
do in hearing people tell of things. We cannot 
expect to remember all that we are told; we may 
remember or we may not, according as the ideas 
strike us at the time. Now " Widowers' Houses " 
and " Mrs. Warren's Profession," which are the 
two of Mr. Shaw's plays that have the least in- 
teresting ideas, are the two of which the idea re- 
mains most readily in the mind, because in each 
case, what idea there is, is expressed in a dramatic 
way. It is embodied in a figure, Vivien returning 
to her work at Frazer and Warren's, Trench 
shaking hands with Mr. Sartorius; these people 
remain in our minds in a manner sufficiently sug- 
gestive of the idea that is necessitated by the ex- 
istence of each. But the other plays do not leave 
much of an idea; admirable characters some of 
them have, and to be remembered for themselves 
(the waiter, the Reverend James, 'Enery Straker), 



124 BERNARD SHAW 

but not for any ideas implicit in them. So the 
ideas have to trust to whatever statement of them 
there may happen to be, and in a drama such 
statement is always insufficient; sometimes in a 
good play we have explanations of theory, like 
Graf Trast's disquisition on honour in " Die 
Ehre," but generally the dialogue of a play is not 
well fitted for that purpose. We do not, then, 
remember Mr. Shaw's ideas very well, and thus in 
a short time he becomes, as far as any effect is 
concerned, much like anybody else. 

The second reason that his ideas do not affect 
us much is hardly worth mentioning after the first. 
It is that his ideas, as a rule, are not such as can 
in any way be promulgated on the stage. Some 
ideas can: the constant effort of the idealist, the 
constant strife of the individual, — these ideas (it 
is fair to call them so) can be dramatically pre- 
sented. They may not be worth so much in the 
practical affairs of life as a correct understand- 
ing of the way that man is going to get married 
in his development into future ages, o? the way 
man should manage whatever marriage he happens 
to be concerned in now, but they seem to be more 
susceptible of dramatic presentation. Take a 
thesis like that of " Man and Superman " or of 
" Candida," if you can get at it. It will be found 
to be a social generalisation, which, even to be 



BERNARD SHAW 125 

considered, must be presented either on the basis 
of reason or of authority. A play is the place 
for neither. The Germans are apt to think that 
Shakespeare wrote his plays to present great and 
often complicated social ideas, but if he did he 
was wasting his time, for that is not the kind of 
idea the drama can present effectively. It can 
present the conception of the disharmony of the 
man of thought in a world of action as in " Ham- 
let," the place of young love in an old civilisation 
that is tired of it, as in " Romeo and Juliet," but 
those are much simpler notions. 

But of course it is of no earthly consequence 
whether Mr. Shaw is a dramatist or not. He can 
write most amusing plays, and, now that the 
whirligig of time has spun a bit, we can see them 
on the stage. And if we do not always get his 
Ideas, — or at least do not remember them when 
we do get them, — yet still something remains. We 
have had a constant challenge and stimulus, a fre- 
quent opening of the window. We shall con- 
stantly turn to his work with the desire for reality 
and the curiosity to know the essential under the 
superficial, and the assurance that by holding on 
and constantly purifying our vision, we may see 
well enough to get a step or two nearer the truth. 



STEPHEN PHILLIPS 

" Suddenly, out of a clear sky, the poetic 
drama is upon us." 

Some time ago a gifted and brilliant critic 
began an article with these extraordinary words. 
They served him chiefly as introduction to an ac- 
count of a particular poetic drama which had been 
produced with " large and wholesome and prudent 
success " at Pittsburg. But they were inspired 
by Mr. Beerbohm Tree's acceptance of the play 
of " Herod," by Mr. Stephen Phillips. 

I quote them now, because they made such a 
singular impression upon me that I think they 
may appeal to others. They seem to me to repre- 
sent a very curious critical frame of mind, I think 
it should be called ; a sort of disposition, as it were, 
a feeling that there is such a thing as " the poetic 
drama," that its appearance has been earnestly 
looked and longed for, that by one act of good- 
natured magic on the part of Mr. Beerbohm Tree, 
a great consummation is about to come to pass, 
and that an epoch-making moment is at hand, — 
or rather was. 

126 



STEPHEN PHILLIPS 127 

I may be singular in not having ever held such a 
view, but I confess that, though I should be glad 
to see more good plays at the theatre, I do not 
care a pin to have them poetic dramas. 

In fact, when Mr. Phillips seeks to restore 
poetry to the English stage, he strives against 
wind and tide. Every great poet of the 19th cen- 
tury tried the same thing and failed. Coleridge 
finally succeeded in getting Sheridan to produce 
" Remorse " at Drury Lane ; it was successful and 
is now not even read. Shelley chose the drama 
mainly as a means for lyric poetry, and should 
not be counted. Keats, Mr. Phillips's forerunner, 
— but it would be pressing the matter to say that 
he did anything of the sort, though he did write a 
play. So did Wordsworth, though it was never 
presented. Scott's " Doom of Devorgoil " was 
by no means as successful as the commonplace 
dramatisations that followed upon the Waverley 
novels as they appeared. Browning wrote several 
plays for the theatre, and though they were not 
failures, they have not kept the stage. The same 
must be said of Tennyson. As for Swinburne, it 
is not probable that he meant his plays for the 
stage any more than did Byron, who, however, 
appears occasionally in a spectacular " Sarda- 
napalus " or a literary " Manfred." 

In fact, if we compare the 19th century with 



128 STEPHEN PHILLIPS 

the age of Elizabeth we have a curious contrast. 
About 1600 we have a large group of dramatists 
who as poets were at least of the second order 
("all but one "), producing plays that appear 
to have pleased and delighted the play-going pub- 
lic, while three centuries later we have a series of 
poets of greater poetic power than the Eliza- 
bethans, who are certainly unable to hold the 
stage, or, as a rule, even to obtain a footing there. 
Further we may remark that even as literature, 
as poetry, the drama of the 19th century is not 
comparable to that of the 16th. 

Such is the verdict of history which Mr. Phil- 
lips or any one else who attempts " the poetic 
drama " moves to set aside. If we ask as to the 
grounds, we have the rather vague idea that there 
ought to be poetry on our stage, that the drama 
is the highest form of poetry, that it is a shame 
that we cannot have poetry at the theatre as well 
as the French or the Germans. 

Turning the matter over in our minds, we may 
ask why any other poet should think of succeed- 
ing in the direction where the most successful 
poetry of Shakespeare is a failure. Mr. Bernard 
Shaw says that Shakespeare " still holds the stage 
so well that it is not impossible to meet old play- 
goers who have witnessed public performances of 
more than thirty out of his thirty-seven reputed 



STEPHEN PHILLIPS 129 

plays, a dozen of them fairly often, and half a 
dozen over and over again." He adds that he 
has himself seen more than twenty-three. I do 
not doubt the statement, but it is beside the mark. 
There is no doubt that perhaps a dozen of Shake- 
speare's plays hold the stage, but certainly not by 
virtue of their poetry. Rather, it may be well be- 
lieved, in spite of it. Not long ago I saw, as did 
many others who were greatly pleased by it, a 
very beautiful performance of " Romeo and Ju- 
liet " given with wonderful scenery and costume 
and very good acting. It is easy to say of such 
performances that they are very pretty but not 
Shakespeare, but I should not have said so of this 
one. It did not give us everything of Shakespeare, 
but it did give us much. I do not think that ever 
before was I so impressed with the beauty, the 
pathos, the tragedy of the old story. But with 
all that, the poetry of the play was not there : the 
characters, the action, the situations, the settings 
were strongly given, but the Shakespearean poetry 
seemed absent in spite of the words. In the beauti- 
ful scene beginning: 

" Wilt thou begone ? It is not yet near day," 

we had a strong and realistic presentation, but the 
poetry of it seemed to me to have vanished. It may 
be that the lines were not very well given, but I 



130 STEPHEN PHILLIPS 

incline to think that the reason for my impression 
was that the adequate circumstance dulled the 
imagination, that the realism was too much for the 
poetry. 

Some of the most sympathetic critics of Shake- 
speare have held some such notion. Lamb could 
not bear " Lear n on the stage, nor Hazlitt " A 
Midsummer Night's Dream," and both for the 
same reason, that the realism destroyed the 
poetry. So thought one at least who saw " Ulys- 
ses " a year or so ago. 

" This isle," says Ulysses, 
" Set in the glassy ocean's azure swoon, 
With sward of parsley and of violet, 
And poplars shivering in a silvery dream, 
And swell of cedar lawn, and sandal wood, 
And these low-crying birds that haunt the 
deep." 
Or 

" Little bewildered ghosts on this great night ! 
They flock about me — 

Wandering on their way 
To banks of asphodel and spirit flowers. 
Ah, a girl's face ! A boy there with bright hair ! " 

Are not those exquisite passages? Surely, but 
what have they to do with the theatre? Cer- 
tainly the stage setting of " Ulysses " was ade- 






STEPHEN PHILLIPS 131 

quate. Many of the scenes were extremely beauti- 
ful. I remember the gradual taking form and 
shape of the coast of Ithaca as being particularly 
so. But for all that the poetry did not har- 
monise. 

To revert to Shakespeare once more. I am 
inclined (in my dry-as-dust, academic, mole-like 
way) to account for his practical exclusion from 
the stage. Managers who watch the public mind 
say that Shakespeare generally lacks " heart-in- 
terest," that he presents no problems, or some- 
thing of the sort. But the matter lies deeper. 

Shakespeare wrote his plays for a stage very 
different from ours. It will perhaps be said that 
ours is better, that we can give his plays much 
more effectively than the Globe Theatre could do, 
and also that Shakespeare would gladly have taken 
advantage of our possibilities had he been able. 
These things may be so and yet the important 
thing is not, say, that we can give Shakespeare 
better than his own theatre could, but that we do 
give them very differently; and also, not that 
Shakespeare would have written with pleasure for 
a more developed stage than he had, but that he 
did T rite especially for a stage less developed than. 
our. own. 

It is wrong to imagine Shakespeare as an in- 
spired barbarian, his eye in fine frenzy rolling, 



132 STEPHEN PHILLIPS 

pouring out poetry for posterity. What he 
really thought of posterity in connection with his 
plays may never be known, but there can be little 
doubt that he wrote his plays with a definite con- 
sideration of just the conditions under which they 
were to be presented. There was undoubtedly an 
element of the business man (surely a part of 
Shakespeare) dealing with the business proposi- 
tion, namely the Globe Theatre and the Lord 
Chamberlain's men. It was not that Shakespeare 
wrote merely to please the public. It was that he 
knew his powers so well that he could easily please 
the public and be a poet too. So he dealt with 
the actual conditions in his own way. Instead of 
grumbling at the interruptions of his comic ac- 
tors, he used them for his own ends. Instead of 
shrugging his shoulders, merely, at the clumsy 
way in which his boy heroines managed their 
skirts, he put them into doublet and hose when- 
ever he could. Instead of being cribbed and con- 
fined by the simple scaffold of a stage, he used 
every opportunity given him by the stage-manage- 
ment of his day. Instead of feeling any lack of 
the scenery with which the masques of Ben Jon- 
son were beautified, he took advantage of the 
chance for descriptive poetry. 

And he produced a drama very appropriate to 
the Elizabethan stage. That stage relied almost 



STEPHEN PHILLIPS 133 

entirely upon the dramatist and the actor. The 
dramatist provided a mobile and fluent dramatic 
poem, and the actor presented it with his best abil- 
ity in declamation and gesture. Our conception 
of realism at the theatre was unknown. Our idea 
of spectacle was confined to the amusements of the 
upper classes. 

So far as real conditions are concerned the 
Shakespearean Hamlet was an actor clad in the 
costume of his day, standing on a stage in the 
midst of the audience, even surrounded on the 
stage itself by a half-circle of spectators. Let 
us think of that when next we see the melancholy 
Dane in appropriate costume (of the 11th century 
or the 16th, as the manager happens to choose) 
seated on an antique chair on a stage that gives 
with historical accuracy all the circumstance of 
the palace of Elsinore. And if we will so think, let 
us ask whether the poetry written for the situa- 
tion in which there was nothing else will be likely 
to satisfy our hearts when our eyes are glutted by 
the brilliant actuality that has become so impor- 
tant to us. 

I think not. The poet at the present day who 
writes for the stage deliberately puts himself into 
competition with costume, scenery, and music. 
Wagner alone has consciously sought harmony 
in such competition, and with Wagner his music 



134 STEPHEN PHILLIPS 

has certainly triumphed at the sacrifice of the 
rest. 

Mr. Phillips may succeed on the stage, but it 
will be in spite of his poetry and not by reason of 
it. Let me speak again of the newspaper story, 
which is typical, if not true. When he read 
" Herod " to Mr. Beerbohm Tree, the actor-man- 
ager listened without remark until he came to a 
place where there was the sound of distant trum- 
pets. At this he began to have confidence. " He 
had not known that I had been an actor," re- 
marked with modest pride the poet who had seen 
pass unnoticed the lines: 

" And all behind him is 
A sense of something coming on the world, 
A crying of dead prophets from their tombs, 
A singing of dead poets from their graves. 

I ever dread the young." 

No, I fear that poetry has no place on our stage 
and that she will not have, at least just at pres- 
ent. The Elizabethan drama gave poetry to 
people who could not otherwise get it. It was 
public poetry, recited for those who could not 
read. Do we to-day wish to listen to poetry? It 
may be a doubtful question, but I incline to think 
that we read so much that we do not wish merely 
to listen to anything. Who is there when some- 



STEPHEN PHILLIPS 135 

thing is read aloud from a newspaper, but wants to 
take the paper and read for himself? Who is 
there that having heard a poem from the lips, even 
of a good reader, does not wish to take the book 
in his own hand and read it. Poetry is hardly 
a public art. It is true that Lowell read an Ode 
on Commemoration Day and Holmes read many 
poems to the class of '£9, and we should all be glad 
to have heard either. But in the main we like to 
have our poetry in the privacy of our firesides, 
of our pensive citadels, of our hearts. I have no 
desire to hear beautiful poetry in a crowd: I had 
rather be by myself and have it alone. So, unless 
I am singular in this respect, poetry will not flour- 
ish on our stage. 

The attentive and logical reader will probably 
incline to think that this is a short-sighted view 
in a period which has produced the poetical 
dramas of Rostand, and various others. I can- 
not help that. I am not going to try to explain 
why the various nations of Europe are different. 
The French theatre is different from ours and so 
is French poetry. " To what shall we attribute 
it," wrote somebody in the Quarterly Review, 
" that the frivolous and ignorant audience of 
Paris, content with a dark and heavy house, a 
dirty scene, and six fiddlers, shall listen with 
earnest attention to a lifeless translation of 



136 STEPHEN PHILLIPS 

' Philoctetes,' while the phlegmatic and reflecting 
citizens of London, in a gaudy house glittering 
with innumerable lights, demand show and song 
and bustle and procession and supernumerary 
murders, even in the animated plays of Shake- 
speare? . . . But, whatever the cause, the fact 
is undoubted, and whoever writes for the theatre 
must submit to take it into account." That was 
nearly a century ago; to-day the circumstances 
are very different, but not the essential fact. I 
follow the advice and take account of it in my 
view that, whatever may be the tendency and 
nature of the Latin races, the English and Ameri- 
cans do not value poetry at the theatre or any- 
where else in public. 

Of course it does not follow that because poetry 
is not for the stage, there can be nothing for the 
stage but costume and scenery. There is room for 
much else, and whatever be its name, it is some- 
thing which will always tend to make the stage 
finer the more of it there is. There is a passage 
in Byron's " Manfred " that will illustrate the mat- 
ter better than I can explain it. It comes in that 
scene in the Hall of Arimanes where the phantom 
of Astarte rises and stands in the midst. Manfred 
speaks : 
" Astarte ! My beloved ! speak to me : 

I have so much endured — so much endure — 



STEPHEN PHILLIPS 137 

Look on me ! The grave hath not changed thee 

more 
Than I am changed for thee. Thou lovedst me 
Too much, as I loved thee ; we were not made 
To torture thus each other, though it were 
The deadliest sin to love as we have loved. 
Say that thou loath'st me not — that I do bear 
This punishment for both — that thou wilt be 
One of the blessed — and that I shall die ; 
For hitherto all hateful things conspire 
To bind me in existence — in a life 
Which makes me shrink from immortality — 
A future like the past. I cannot rest. 
I know not what I ask nor what I seek ; 
I feel but what thou art, and what I am ; 
And I would hear yet once before I perish 
The voice that was my music — speak to me ! 
For I have called on thee in the still night, 
Startled the slumbering birds from the hushed 

boughs, 
And woke the mountain wolves, and made the 

caves 
Acquainted with thy vainly echoed name, 
Which answered me — many things answered 

me — 
Spirits and men — but thou wert silent all. 
Yet speak to me ! I have outwatched the stars, 
And gazed o'er heaven in vain search of thee. 



138 STEPHEN PHILLIPS 

Speak to me ! I have wandered o'er the earth, 

And never found thy likeness — speak to me ! 

Look on the fiends around — they feel for me ; 

I fear them not and feel for thee alone — 

Speak to me ! though it be in wrath — but say — 

I reck not what — but let me hear thee once — 

This once — once more! 

Phantom of Astarte. Manfred. 

Manfred. Say on, say on — I live but in the 
sound — it is thy voice! 

Phantom. Manfred! To-morrow ends thine 
earthly ills. Farewell. 

Manfred. Yet one word more — am I forgiven? 

Phantom. Farewell ! 

Manfred. Say shall we meet again? 

Phantom. Farewell ! 

Manfred. One word for mercy! Say thou 
lovest me — 

Phantom. Manfred ! " 

(The Phantom disappears.) 

I presume that the imaginative, the apprecia- 
tive, the artistic reader of this passage is always 
profoundly moved by it. I was never specially 
moved until I saw the play given upon the stage. 
Then, amid a good deal of frippery and foolish- 
ness, the intonation alone of that last word " Man- 
fred ! " gave the whole scene a glory that it has 



STEPHEN PHILLIPS 139 

never lost. In a life in which (like most) much 
average work and play, much old commonplace and 
new experience tends to dull the keen sense of the 
beauty of bygone moments, there remains to me 
always the poignant passion of that voice as from 
the open tomb, giving an emotion so intense that 
current reality, even, fades before it into a forgot- 
ten dream. Some readings in Heredia, the sight of 
the Winged Victory as she stands at the head of 
the staircase, the Garden act of " Tristan," the 
first thrilling delight at the pictures of Rembrandt 
— not to mention matters that do not belong here 
— none have a surer place in my recollection than 
this. I could say as Hazlitt said of the Man with 
the Glove : " What a look is there. . . that draws 
the evil out of human life, that while we look at it 
transfers the same sentiment to our own breasts 
and makes us feel as if nothing mean or little 
could disturb us again." 

But this is not the poetry but the situation. And 
it is the situation that the drama, and especially on 
the stage, can give as nothing else can. Everybody 
can parallel the case, from the prose drama as 
well as the poetic — I could say myself a passage 
in the third act of " Sodom's Ende " ( " Reinheit ! " ) 
as well as the end of the third act of " L'Aiglon." 
And those who go much to the theatre count on 
such moments, for they are far more a possibility 



140 STEPHEN PHILLIPS 

for the stage than for literature or even poetry. 
I cannot recall a case in my seeing Shakespeare 
save where Mr. Booth sprang up after the play 
in " Hamlet." 

But to return to Mr. Phillips. It was prob- 
ably this electric moment that Mr. Tree noticed 
when he heard of the trumpets in Herod. Mr. 
Phillips, as a former actor, doubtless knows a dra- 
matic situation. Whether he has power to create 
one of the first order is another matter. There 
are situations and situations ; a single melodrama 
may have a dozen. But will they be real ones? 
One needs the stage to judge. So far as reading 
is concerned, I should say we had one at the very 
end of " Herod." 

Of course one hopes that Mr. Phillips will 
create more, for if he does he is a friend to the 
human race, immeasurably lightening its miseries 
and adding to its joys. To have a wonderful 
possession of that sort is a great thing. Even 
so, however, what has it to do with poetry, unless 
it be that poetry is smuggled in along with the 
drama for literary respectability's sake, as some 
earnest critics would have us believe that an idea 
may be smuggled into poetry as a sort of ballast? 

Mr. Phillips has written very charming poetry, 
some lines of which are apropos here. They 
occur in the words of Idas to Marpessa. 



STEPHEN PHILLIPS 141 

" Not for this only do I love thee, but 

Because infinity upon thee broods ; 

And thou art full of whispers and of shadows. 

Thou meanest what the sea has striven to say 

So long, and yearned up the cliffs to tell; 

Thou art what all the winds have uttered not, 

What the still night suggesteth to the heart. 

Thy voice is like to music heard ere birth, 

Some spirit lute touched on a spirit sea ; 

Thy face remembered is from other worlds, 

It has been died for, though I know not when, 

It has been sung of, though I know not where. 

It has the strangeness of the luring West, 

And of sad sea-horizons ; beside thee 

I am aware of other times and lands, 

Of birth far back, of lives in many stars. 

O beauty lone, and like a candle clear 

In this dark country of the world ! Thou art 

My woe, my early light, my music dying." 

Those are very beautiful lines, but if they rightly 
represent Mr. Phillips' power, do they not mark 
his language at least as not dramatic? 

But if a man write dramas — poetic or not — 
for which the stage can do but little, it does not 
follow that the dramas are without value. Of 
course the judgment of half a dozen theatrical 
critics or of a whole theatrical audience will never 



142 STEPHEN PHILLIPS 

establish that. They may say, or show clearly 
by their actions, that the play is not suited to the 
stage, — of which the purpose is not so much, as 
an eminent lover of the theatre is said to have 
remarked, " to hold the mirror up to nature " as 
it is rather to offer the public a very special and 
delightful kind of pleasure. But a drama may 
not be in the least suited to the stage, and yet be 
a very good thing for all that. There are and 
have been many stages — Greek, Elizabethan, 
French, our own, not to mention Chinese and 
Japanese; no play was ever written that could 
suit them all, although each form of theatre must 
offer some opportunity for creating the true dra- 
matic thrill. A play cannot be good for all; 
perhaps it may be good for none, and yet be a 
source of very great pleasure to " those that like 
that sort of thing." 

Just what that sort of thing is, is not a very 
difficult matter to state. There is a convenience 
in the dramatic form that enables some men to 
express themselves better in that way than in any 
other. Browning was a man of that kind: he had 
a curiosity in regard to life and a sympathy for 
living people that made him enter into his char- 
acters and speak for them, as it were. He did 
so in his first poem, " Pauline," which was a mono- 
logue ; in his second, " Paracelsus," which was a 



STEPHEN PHILLIPS 143 

dramatic poem with no possibilities for the stage ; 
and he did so in " Strafford," which he made a 
regular stage-play for Macready. Then — if I 
may touch dangerous ground for a moment — he 
wrote " Sordello." Tennyson, the story goes, 
said he understood but two lines in this poem — 
the first and last — and that neither was true. 
Now, the lines are as follows : 

" Who will may hear Sordello's story told." 

" Who would has heard Sordello's story told." 

It may be admitted that " Sordello " is not a very 
simple narrative, but it certainly is a narrative. 
The lines are quite true, for the story is told — 
well or ill, of course — that is, it is not in dramatic 
form. Browning explains this at the beginning 
of the poem, in a passage which was presumably 
beyond Tennyson's comprehension, but which now, 
thanks to sixty years of Browning clubs, will be 
as clear as cosmic jelly. 

" Never, I should warn you first, 
Of my own choice had this, if not the worst, 
Yet not the best expedient, served to tell 
A story I could body forth so well 
By making speak, myself kept out of view, 
The very man as he was wont to do, 
And leaving you to say the rest for him." 



144 STEPHEN PHILLIPS 

That puts the matter fairly enough: Browning 
liked to let the man speak for himself, so he com- 
monly wrote in dramatic form. When he under- 
took to tell the tale himself the results were not 
so good. The same desire came over Tennyson 
as he grew older, and, though his earlier poems 
are mostly narratives, his later volumes are full 
of dramatic poetry. Every dramatic poem is not 
a play, but a play is dramatic poetry of the most 
developed and fullest kind. Browning and Ten- 
nyson both wrote plays as well as other forms of 
dramatic poetry, and so have various poets, often 
without much thought of the stage, like Byron. 

After all, why not? I think some of Mr. 
Phillips' best poetry is in his plays. I have 
quoted lines from " Ulysses " and some from 
" Herod." Here are some from " Paolo and 
Francesca " : 

Francesca. " All ghostly grew the sun, unreal 
the air, 
Then when we kissed. 

Paolo. And in that kiss our souls 
Together flashed, and now they are one flame, 
Which nothing can put out, nothing divide. 
Francesca. Kiss me again ! I smile at what 

may chance. 
Paolo. Again and yet again ! and here and here. 



STEPHEN PHILLIPS 145 

Let me with kisses burn this body away, 
That our two souls may dart together free. 
I fret at intervention of the flesh, 
And would clasp you — you that but inhabit 
This lovely house. 

Francesca. Break open then the door, 
And let my spirit out." 

I have not seen the play acted. But those who 
saw it on the stage, did they not perhaps " fret at 
interference of the flesh " ? It would seem as if 
it might well be so, as one reads that fourth act. 
After all, is it the actual love affair that attracts 
us, that common intrigue so like a thousand others 
save for the intensity of its passion? Do we want 
to see two live, beautiful, charmingly dressed 
young people in each other's arms? I think 
hardly. It is the essence of the poetry, the soul 
going out of itself, that we want, and that is in 
the lines. There is another " Francesca " on the 
stage, and that, I am told, has too much real blood 
in it. I should think it likely. Real blood, like a 
real pump or any realistic setting, distracts the 
mind, which for the time would be conscious only 
of its own emotion. It is like a magic-lantern 
show going on with the curtain raised and day- 
light coming in. 

Mr. Phillips has power to stir those subtle ele- 



146 STEPHEN PHILLIPS 

ments of our being that respond to poetry. It 
seems that he wishes also to stir us in a different 
way. It is to be hoped that he will not be like the 
dog with the bone in his mouth, who lost his own 
chop in trying to get another. Or, rather, the fig- 
ure is wrong, for it is we who lose, if loss there be. 
Mr. Phillips will always have the satisfaction of 
being a poet. 



MAETERLINCK 

It was some years before M. Rostand became 
a familiar figure in the literature of the time that 
M. Maeterlinck appeared, and in a very different 
manner. Although a dramatist, he became known 
from the printed versions of his plays. It was in 
1893 that translations of his earlier plays were 
published in America, and up to that time few in 
this country had ever heard of him, fewer were 
acquainted with his work, and none had ever seen 
his works upon the stage. 

M. Maeterlinck was introduced to the wider 
world of letters under the cloud of comparison 
with Shakespeare. In America and England, at 
least, he was therefore received with a smile, as one 
of those humorous " movements " that flutter after 
each other like exquisite humming-birds through 
the Parisian world of letters. He had been called, 
by M. Octave Mirbeau in the Figaro, the Belgian 
Shakespeare. If he had been called the Ollendorf 
Shakespeare, the Puppetshow Shakespeare, or the 
Nursery Shakespeare, the name would have con- 
veyed more accurately the impression which he 

147 



148 MAETERLINCK 

made at first. Some people became very angry at 
him: Max Nordau, a violent person of that day, 
called him a mental cripple, an idiotic driveller, 
an imbecile plagiarist. In general, people merely 
could not understand him at all, though they could 
see that some of his ways were funny. The well- 
known dialogue — people may not remember that 
it was quite as remarkable as the burlesques on it : 

MALEINE 

" Wait ! I am beginning to see. 

NURSE 

Do you see the city? 

MALEINE 

No. 

NURSE 

And the castle? 

MALEINE 

No. 

NURSE 

It must be on the other side. 

MALEINE 

And yet . . . There is the sea. 

NURSE 

There is the sea? 

MALEINE 

Yes, yes; the sea. It is green. 



MAETERLINCK 149 

NURSE 

But then you ought to see the city. Let us 
look. 

MALEINE 

I see the lighthouse. 

NURSE 

You see the lighthouse? 

MALEINE 

Yes; I think it is the lighthouse. 

NURSE 

But, then, you ought to see the city. 

MALEINE 

I do not see the city. 

NURSE 

You do not see the city? 

MALEINE 

I do not see the city. 

NURSE 

Do you see the belfry? 

MALEINE 

No. 

NURSE 

This is extraordinary." 

It was, very. There were undoubtedly things 
to be said for such dialogue; still it was funny, 
though not uproariously so. Then his princesses, 



150 MAETERLINCK 

the babies with long hair: in one piece seven of 
them, each as infantile as all the others put to- 
gether — no one takes them seriously. There was 
certainly a good deal that was humorous about 
M. Maeterlinck. 

Nor did those who admired his work always hit 
upon just the right things. I will here mention 
myself, merely as an example of one who was much 
taken with M. Maeterlinck's first writings and yet 
was quite unable to see what has turned out to be 
the important thing in them. It chanced that 
another poet published about the same time a col- 
lection of dramatic pieces which resembled in some 
ways M. Maeterlinck's plays. It is not important 
whether or no they were imitations — probably not. 
But they were very like them, and I allow myself 
to quote a few lines written ten years ago about 
them. 

It was under the title " The Antennae of 
Poetry," and although the article itself showed 
little critical keenness or foresight, the title, as 
appeared later, was not a bad one. In my then 
view people like Maeterlinck were experimental- 
ists, and fulfilled a useful function in poetry, or 
any other kind of art, being always on the lookout 
for things that were new, amusing, or edifying. 
And in what they offered, as in these cases, the 
interesting thing lay largely in the mode of ap- 



MAETERLINCK 151 

preciation or presentation. " They are not con- 
ceived," I remarked, " in any approach to the 
classic manner, but in a manner ultra-romantic. 
For although the main emotion is always present 
before us, it is not presented simply, but always 
by means of a multitude of extremely fine and deli- 
cate nuances, indefinite hopes and fears, presenti- 
ments, imaginings and spiritual accompaniments, 
premonitions almost occult, faint ripples of emo- 
tion, little wavelets that skim over the waves of 
passion." Such to my mind was the character- 
istic of Mr. Sharpe's work, and of M. Maeter- 
linck's, too, except that the latter was more of a 
true dramatist, having greater power of drawing 
character. 

It was not very clever of me to have found 
nothing more to say on the first five plays of M. 
Maeterlinck. That I should have entirely missed 
the real purport of his idea and been wholly taken 
up by the accessories, shows one of the practical 
difficulties that any one has to meet in dealing with 
a new effort of romanticism. What I noticed, the 
general tone and method, the character-drawing, 
all that amounted to nothing; M. Maeterlinck 
would have been himself without either quality. 

One thing in the article, however, was, I believe, 
good, and that, as I have just said, was the title. 
Not in precisely the manner in which I conceived 



152 MAETERLINCK 

it, but still in a way near enough to mention was 
the name significant. And this I say, not because 
I think so myself, but because almost the same 
phrase was afterward used by Maeterlinck in 
" Le Tresor des Humbles," published some time 
afterward, when he spoke of Novalis as " one of 
those extraordinary beings who are the antennae 
of the human soul." That was not precisely the 
same thing, but it came rather near it. I was 
thinking of poetry, and Maeterlinck was thinking 
of life. As it turned out, that was the main line 
of his interest. People who considered him only 
as a curious experimenter in dramatic form were 
wrong about him, as also those who bothered their 
heads and their readers by talking about symbol- 
ism. Symbolist he may have been to some degree, 
and experimenter, and various other things. But 
in the main his interest was in philosophy, and has 
been ever since. He writes plays or studies the 
habits of bees, not merely as diversions, but as 
means of expression or attainment of something 
concerning the problem of life. 

Before the publication of " Le Tresor des 
Humbles," M. Maeterlinck had been known as a 
philosophic man of letters. Every serious author 
is more or less philosophic ; he Kas something to 
say of the general principles of life ; he can hardly 
avoid having some philosophy, although he may 



MAETERLINCK 153 

make no effort to state it systematically or even 
directly. In this new book, however, M. Maeter- 
linck became a literary philosopher and sketched 
for his readers his theory of life. The remark- 
able thing about the book was not that M. Maeter- 
linck should have a philosophy, but that he should 
try to express it definitely, for the main idea in 
style of his previous work had been that his 
thoughts were not such as could be definitely ex- 
pressed, and indeed that idea was rather the 
foundation of this book. Still, for all that, by 
" Le Tresor des Humbles " M. Maeterlinck pre- 
sented himself as a philosopher of a known school, 
and his work was seen to have a place in a known 
tendency of our time. 

M. Maeterlinck now appeared to be a mystic. 
The name Mystic is a vague one and comprehends 
people as far apart as Plotinus and George Fox. 
Mystics are perhaps not much farther known than 
as they are known to be mystics. Still the word 
gives us some idea of a standpoint. A mystic I 
take to be a person who believes in the acquirement 
of truth by intuition rather than by any process 
of reason and argument. Thus the person who 
sees visions is a mystic, the person who has pre- 
sentiments, the person who has something borne in 
upon him. Any one who believes in gaining truth 
by some process more direct than the ordinary 



154 MAETERLINCK 

process of rational thought is, in so far, a mystic. 
There have been Christian mystics and mystics 
who were not Christians; the word has been very 
loosely used. M. Maeterlinck, like others in what 
was called in those days the neo-Christian move- 
ment, had been interested in Carlyle and Emerson, 
but also by those more commonly thought of as 
mystics — Eckhard, Ruysbroek, Boehme. 

His particular view, however, as presented in 
" Le Tresor des Humbles," was not the mysticism 
of any of these. It was, I believe, his own. " It 
is idle," says his book at the beginning, " to think 
that by means of words, any real communication 
can ever pass from one man to another." How, 
then? By Silence: in the great silent moments 
of life, such moments as everybody knows, experi- 
enced in love, sport, work, religion, not necessarily 
moments of great emotion, but moments in which 
we seem to become aware of much. It is M. 
Maeterlinck's idea that in such moments we may 
become aware of much; indeed, that in such mo- 
ments only do we get to know anything worth 
knowing. Those who attune themselves to such 
moments, who learn to use them, find deep mean- 
ings in presentiments, in the strange impression 
produced by a chance meeting or a look (the 
words are in the main Maeterlinck's own), in the 
secret laws of sympathy and antipathy, of elective 



MAETERLINCK 155 

and instinctive affinities, in the overwhelming in- 
fluence of the thing that had not been spoken. 

The precise view of the universe which M. 
Maeterlinck held to result from such moments, or 
from such receptivity, need not be stated just here. 
What is of interest now is to show the dramatic 
side of it. It is obvious that such an idea has dra- 
matic possibilities. In the matter of conveying 
an idea without saying anything — by the secret 
means of sympathy, instinctive affinity, strange 
impression — Mme. Sarah Bernhardt would seem 
to be a mystic of the first water. It was not pre- 
cisely such powers, however, that M. Maeterlinck 
had in mind when he thought of the drama as a 
means for the expression of his idea. What he 
had in mind he said in an essay on " The Tragical 
in Daily Life," a short statement which put a 
whole dramatic art into a nutshell. For a phi- 
losopher of M. Maeterlinck's type the essay is sin- 
gularly definite and logical in its arrangement. 

First, as to subject: must it always be some 
violence ? " Does the soul flower only on nights 
of storm? Hitherto, doubtless, this idea has pre- 
vailed." But a new idea is becoming known, and 
he turns to painting to show that Marius triumph- 
ing over the Cimbrians, or the assassination of the 
Duke of Guise, is no longer the type. The painter 
" will place on his canvas a house lost in the heart 



156 MAETERLINCK 

of the country, an open door at the end of a 
passage, a face and hands at rest, and by these 
simple images will he add to our consciousness of 
life, which is a possession that it is no more pos- 
sible to lose." Nor will the drama deal with ex- 
traordinary convulsions of life; why should the 
dramatist imagine that we shall delight in witness- 
ing the very same acts that brought joy to the 
hearts of the barbarians, with whom murder, out- 
rage, and treachery were matters of daily occur- 
rence ? 

So much for subject: next, M. Maeterlinck 
spoke of action, or, rather, the lack of it — and 
presented his view of a " static theatre," namely, 
a drama in which there was no action at all, a 
view which followed naturally from his conception 
of subject, which suggests the question, Are these 
motives suitable to the drama? It has only been 
shown that they are possible in painting, which 
is something very different. It is under this head 
that one comes on the locus classicus of the static 
dramaturgy. 

" I admire Othello, but he does not appear to me 
to live the august daily life of Hamlet, who has 
time to live, inasmuch as he does not act. Othello 
is admirably jealous. But is it not perhaps an 
ancient error to imagine that it is at the moments 
when this passion, or others of equal violence, pos- 



MAETERLINCK 157 

sesses us, that we live our truest lives? I have 
grown to believe that an old man, seated in his 
armchair, waiting patiently, with his lamp beside 
him ; giving unconscious ear to all the eternal laws 
that reign about his house, interpreting, without 
comprehending, the silence of doors and windows 
and the quivering voice of the light, submitting 
with bent head to the presence of his soul and his 
destiny — an old man who conceives not that all 
the powers of this world, like so many heedful 
servants, are mingling and keeping vigil in his 
room, who suspects not that the very sun itself is 
supporting in space the little table against which 
he leans, or that every star in heaven and every 
fibre of the soul are directly concerned in the move- 
ment of an eyelid that closes, or a thought that 
springs to birth — I have grown to believe that he, 
motionless as he is, does yet live in reality a deeper, 
more human, and more universal life than the 
lover who strangles his mistress, the captain who 
conquers in battle, or ' the husband who avenges 
his honour.' " 

And finally as to the dialogue. It is the com- 
mon opinion that the words of a play should be 
directed especially to the action of the play, and, 
theoretically, one would be likely to say that there 
should not be any word at all that should not get 
the action ahead. M. Maeterlinck pronounces to 



158 MAETERLINCK 

the contrary. The only words that count in his 
view are those that at first seem quite useless. It 
is the words which are caused by the demands and 
necessities of the case that are as insignificant as 
the action itself. Who thinks that the best con- 
versation at dinner consists in asking for the 
salt, or saying you will have some bread? Here 
the only words of high worth are the useless ones. 
So in the drama, says M. Maeterlinck, who, by 
the way, does not use so material a figure. It is 
the super-essential meaning that we must open 
our ears for; it is that which we must get if we 
are to get anything at all. 

All of which is very systematically reasoned out 
on a basis not at all difficult to understand. 

What, then, were the dramas made upon this 
basis, so different from the common theory of the 
day? A theme from the simplest daily life, an 
action where nothing happens, a dialogue where 
the only words of value are the meaningless ones. 
One will readily suppose that any drama made on 
such principles will excite all the astonishment 
that was shown on the first appearance of the 
plays of Maeterlinck. 

It will be a surprise to those who do not remem- 
ber, to learn that the only plays of M. Maeter- 
linck's first publication that were received with 
scoffing were those in which he did not carry out his 



MAETERLINCK 159 

principles, so that people could recognise them. 
" La Princesse Maleine " and " Les Sept Prin- 
cesses " were the two of his first four dramas that 
excited great derision. But " Les Aveugles " and 
"L'Intrus " — where theme, action, and dialogue 
follow his own ideas — were received with respect. 

The first-mentioned plays do not, ostensibly at 
least, carry out M. Maeterlinck's ideas. What is 
the action of " La Princesse Maleine " ? Marius 
and the Duke of Guise shrink into insignificance 
in comparison with this little lady who goes 
through battles and murders to sudden death. 
How is it with the " Seven Princesses " ? If their 
souls do not flourish in a night of storm it is cer- 
tainly in a period of strange agitations. In these 
two plays we have nothing simple, natural, nor- 
mal; all is as wild as the delights of our despised 
ancestors. 

But in " L'Intrus " it is not so. It is not a 
remarkable scene, only a family around the even- 
ing table. Nothing remarkable occurs; indeed, 
nothing at all occurs, that we can see. Nothing 
is said of any importance save as we happen to 
perceive the importance of chance words, and yet 
what a powerful little piece it is. How it goes 
on the stage I do not know (nor much care till I 
may chance to see it), but one cannot read it with- 
out feeling its power. " Les Aveugles " is not 



160 MAETERLINCK 

quite so consistent ; it is not a matter of ordinary 
occurrence for a priest to lead a party of the 
blind whom he is overseeing, into a wood, and then 
suddenly die. But the piece is almost as effective 
as the other. 

These two pieces made their impression with 
perfect sureness, even though conceived according 
to the curious theories we have just noted. It is 
true that the ideas which they conveyed were not 
hard to grasp: the approach of death, the posi- 
tion of humanity with a dead church. There may 
have been ideas signified in " La Princesse Ma- 
leine " and " Les Sept Princesses," but they could 
not be so readily imagined. Yet M. Maeterlinck's 
theory was, in a measure, justified by these two 
failures, for whatever ideas these plays may have 
meant to convey was lost in the extravagance of 
the subject and the action, even though the dia- 
logue was as simple as in the others. 

Indeed it is now apparent that, in spite of 
theory and in spite of failure, these two were the 
typical pieces. The others presented, curiously, 
it is true, but by a symbolism by no means un- 
common, ideas that could readily be expressed in 
other ways, and have often been so expressed. 
" There is a stillness of death," says the Father 
in " L'Intrus," and reminds us that it is all based 
upon a common and everyday conception, and that 



MAETERLINCK 161 

it represents no new truth and indeed no truth at 
all. The ideas are common and have been often 
expressed. It was M. Maeterlinck's desire to 
present ideas that had not been expressed, that 
could not be expressed by common means. Let us 
imagine that he wished to convey something in 
" La Princesse Maleine " and in " Les Sept Prin- 
cesses " ; it is not necessary, nor at present useful, 
to try to determine what it was, but the very 
nature of the plays leads us to the belief that it 
was not anything that could be conveyed by usual 
dramatic methods. 

With this idea in mind we may turn to " Pelleas 
et Melisande." We shall find it in form at least, 
like the plays just mentioned, something contrary 
to the theories of dramatic art which the author 
had put forward not long before. But as those 
theories were founded upon a definite and intelli- 
gible system (however we may disagree with it), 
we may be sure that the opposition is but super- 
ficial. " Pelleas et Melisande " is a play of love 
and revenge, like various others; it has a suffi- 
ciently definite action, like an ordinary play; it 
has a dialogue which carries that action along, 
as the common stage dialogue does. It would 
seem that M. Maeterlinck had persuaded himself 
that what appeared to be characteristic in 
" L'Intrus " and " Les Aveugles " was not essen- 



162 MAETERLINCK 

tial, that he could gain his effects in the manner 
of a conventional play. He therefore has ordi- 
nary subject, action, dialogue. If we would get 
at his idea, then, we must neglect these convention- 
alities and see what is left. 

The story of a man whose wife falls in love with 
his brother is not essential; if it were we should 
suppose that M. Maeterlinck had something es- 
sential in common with Stephen Phillips, which 
would probably lead us into neglect of the chief 
virtues of each. The strange region of romance 
with its castles and caverns, its midnight meetings 
and violent murderings, that too is not essen- 
tial ; if it were, we might imagine that we had to do 
with a man like M. Rostand or Hauptmann, though 
this is pre-Raphaelite romance and theirs is ro- 
mance of very different kind. But the story, the 
setting of " Pelleas et Melisande " have too much 
in common with other plays for us to think that 
they are of prime importance with M. Maeterlinck. 
They are the very things he pronounces to be 
useless. If we neglect these matters, what is left? 

Into a dark, and old, and melancholy world, a 
world not utterly without gleams of sunshine and 
a flower or two, but still constrained to its gloom 
by its own people, and by the people of ages 
long past, into such a world comes a spirit of 
beauty from a faraway and unknown place. Here 



MAETERLINCK 163 

in this gloomy world are such people as we know: 
a powerful, active man, a child, an old man whose 
wisdom has taught him only that the riddle of the 
universe is unsolvable, and a young man. What- 
ever the relations of these people may have been, 
they are disturbed by the newcomer ; the new charm 
and beauty bring delight but also discord. It is 
the young man that especially understands this 
new companion; the feeling of others is but ex- 
ternal and superficial, his understanding is vital. 
But conditions are such that they cannot be to 
each other what they might, and both perish ; leav- 
ing the world much as it was before, save that there 
is a remembrance left of the exquisite and beauti- 
ful one, who will some day take the place now made 
vacant. 

It is not very difficult to see what there is in that, 
— all that need be said is that M. Maeterlinck does 
not deem it necessary to make it very obvious. He 
is content to give us his drama — there must be 
some action, characters, dialogue — and to suggest 
to us continually matters of wisdom and destiny 
that cannot be put in straightforward words with- 
out losing some of their truth; to present to us 
the possibility of a life of the spirit which shall be 
fuller and more beautiful than the life to which 
we are accustomed. Is it then beautiful to love 
your brother's wife? we may ask. M. Maeterlinck 



164 MAETERLINCK 

presumably believes that to love any one is beau- 
tiful. He presents spiritual things by eommon 
means ; he wants to convey the idea of a love which 
overrides the barriers of the intercourse to which 
we are accustomed. The barrier of marriage seems 
to be the one which commonly occurs to him, but in 
itself that is but an accident, resulting perhaps 
from lack of imagination, perhaps from other 
causes. He wants to present to us an intercourse 
of the spirit and by the very nature of the case 
he must depict it in some physical form; in just 
what form is not important. 

But let us not rush upon the notion that we 
must seize the mystical meaning, bear it forth and 
feast upon it alone. The symbolism has its story 
which is necessary to it. Why does the soul have 
a body? We may not be sure, but we know that 
since it has, we must admit it to consideration. M. 
Maeterlinck's play is a play even without regard 
to any symbolism at all. " As it was presented 
yesterday," wrote somebody when Mrs. Patrick 
Campbell gave it in London, " at the Royalty 
Theatre, you felt the poetry of idea, the delicacy 
of suggestion, the rarity and remoteness of it all. 
What does it all mean? Anything beyond what 
lies upon the surface? Perhaps, but at a first 
hearing, at any rate, you are content to enjoy the 
beauty, the romance of Maeterlinck's creation." 



MAETERLINCK 165 

We may enjoy the externals thoroughly, even 
though the essential continually haunts us with a 
vague sense of heightened significance. 

M. Maeterlinck's following plays may be readily 
appreciated after " Pelleas et Melisande " ; we have 
the same externality and the same suggestion of 
spiritual life and conversation. In " Alladine et 
Palamides " we have the same contrast between 
gloomy castle and bright world, the same conflict 
of lovers with the rigidity of common life. The 
story is not precisely the same as in " Pelleas et 
Melisande," but there is quite as much love, jeal- 
ousy, and death. These we need not wish away, 
as Keats says, but we should take them for what 
they are worth, and fix our desire upon the spiri- 
tual content, the super-expressive element to which 
we shall respond only by calming ourselves of 
outward thrills and emotions. " Aglavaine et 
Selysette " is not very different at bottom, though 
the mise en scene is not quite the same. 

In " La Mort de Tintagiles," however, we have 
something rather different in form and in motive. 
It is a very simple and affecting little play, al- 
though less theoretically consistent with M. Mae- 
terlinck's dramaturgy than others. The child in 
the grip of the dark and powerful queen, the 
devoted sisters, their watch and their failure, 
Ygraine's desperation and revolt, — these are 



166 MAETERLINCK 

almost too typical, too symbolic. To present a 
symbol is nothing new, even when done with con- 
summate sensitiveness and mastery of feeling; it 
is a language not unlike the metaphors of every 
day. What M. Maeterlinck seemed to be feeling 
for was the suggestion of much by means of little 
or even nothing. And in spite of the beauty of 
this little piece, I cannot feel in it the elusiveness 
that I have thought it M. Maeterlinck's design to 
convey. Of the other plays " Interieur " is not 
unlike " L'Intrus " in its general character, and 
** Sceur Beatrice " is rather after the fashion of 
some other things. I will confess honestly that I 
have quite failed, however, to get at it, except so 
far as the obvious exoteric proceedings are con- 
cerned. But I believe we need not pause on these 
plays, for there are others more important. 

" Ariane et Barbe Bleue " is a significant little 
piece because it is a sort of commentary. There 
are castles and caverns as in the other plays, but 
at the moment that M. Maeterlinck diverges from 
the nursery tale we see at a flash much. When 
Ariane looks at the keys which Bluebeard has 
given her, and at once selects the forbidden key, 
with the calm " That is the only one of value," 
one can see at once, not allegory, not symbolism, 
but that M. Maeterlinck throughout is assured 
that in prospecting for truth it is useless to go 



MAETERLINCK 167 

where people have gone before and found nothing. 
He searches in those very places which are for- 
bidden by convention, or authority, or fear of ridi- 
cule, or hope of praise, just because the things 
which were allowed to all have been explored by all, 
to no great effect so far as his own interests were 
concerned. That which is permitted is of no value ; 
it will only distract one's attention. If one regards 
the prohibitions of the world, one will go no fur- 
ther than the world. So Ariane at once makes 
for the forbidden door. Her nurse opens various 
other doors that are not forbidden and finds heaps 
of diamonds, pearls, rubies, and other trivial 
things. But Ariane opens the forbidden door 
and finds — all M. Maeterlinck's heroines. She 
finds them in a dark cavern which she makes light 
by letting in the sun. They are dazzled at first. 
When they can see, they long to go to the woods, 
the fields, the ocean. They look upon each other, 
and when they see each other as they are they 
think it very strange. Still, when they gather in 
the hall of the jewels and Bluebeard is delivered to 
them, they cannot make up their minds to break 
their bonds. They care for him till he returns 
to consciousness. Then Ariane says that she 
must go away. Nor will she ever come back. One 
after another: Melisande, Selysette, Ygraine, Bel- 
langere, Alladine refuse to accompany her, and 



168 MAETERLINCK 

she goes forth alone, leaving them in the hall of 
jewels. 

Somehow one cannot take all that seriously, but 
in spite of the humour that cannot be denied (in- 
deed it should surely be appreciated) there is some- 
thing well worth having. Ex oris infantium; 
children have not the wisdom of us elder folks, of 
course. But we do not deny the frequent value of 
their clearsightedness. I confess that M. Maeter- 
linck's long-haired ladies had appeared to me not 
wholly in keeping with the Treasure of the Hum- 
ble, Wisdom and Destiny, the Buried Temple. 
When I read " Ariane et Barbe Bleue " I began 
to see a glimmering of light on the dark river. 

When you begin on " Monna Vanna " you are 
all at sea again. Here is no symbolism, certainly, 
whatever there be elsewhere, and no realism either. 
" Monna Vanna " is not conceived for the static 
theatre, nor for the romantic theatre that we have 
become accustomed to. It is a play of the Italian 
Renaissance, and in externals might be by anybody. 
If it were by anybody else, one could read it easily 
enough ; but being by M. Maeterlinck, we feel that 
there must be more than meets the eye. 

The first accustomed figure in a world of ordi- 
nary strangers is the old man Marco. He has the 
air of calm wisdom with which we are familiar 
from M. Maeterlinck's philosophical writings; he 



MAETERLINCK 169 

is representative of eternal justice; if not of com- 
mon sense, yet of that sense wherein we " see into 
the life of things " and which greets us so often if 
not in M. Maeterlinck's plays, at least in his phi- 
losophy. We recognise it and respond to it. In 
this play, however, his wisdom is not generally 
recognised; it is indeed intensely irritating to 
others on the stage. Marco brings to the captain 
of beleaguered Pisa the offer of the Florentine be- 
sieger; let his wife, Monna Vanna, go to the tent 
of the conqueror in mantle and sandals only, and 
the town shall be spared. Guido is outraged; 
Marco imperturbable. " Why do you consider if 
you have the right to deliver a whole people to 
death in order to delay for a few hours an evil 
which is inevitable; for when the city is taken 
Vanna will fall into the power of the conqueror." 
The Maeterlinckian wisdom is not understood, 
save by Vanna herself, who immediately accepts 
the offer. Guido is indignant and outraged and 
we certainly must sympathise with him, but how 
much less wise he is than the other. 

When Monna Vanna comes to the tent of Prin- 
zivalle she learns that they have met before; he 
met her as a child and has loved her for twenty 
years during all the rush and change of a captain 
of condottieri. There is something noble in such 
devotion and Vanna receives it at its true worth. 



170 MAETERLINCK 

It is something different from everyday sentiment 
and feelings. They return together to Pisa. 

When they get there it is not remarkable that 
Guido does not appreciate this noble love as his 
wife has done. Guido is of the world and cannot 
understand that people will not do as seems most 
natural to him. Marco alone appreciates ; for the 
rest no effort can make a really fine piece of Quix- 
otic idealism seem for a moment possible. Those 
who want to live at a higher level must be satisfied 
with very few companions. 

But I believe M. Maeterlinck succeeds in put- 
ting us on his side. Real justice appears beautiful 
in Marco ; real morality in Vanna ; real love in 
Prinzivalle. Such people will understand each 
other even if everybody else holds them worse than 
fools or knaves. 

The best commentator on M. Maeterlinck, or 
at least the keenest, is M. Maeterlinck himself. 
" Joyzelle " is full of explanation. For the mo- 
ment we may neglect its dramatic character and 
take it for criticism. Merlin has gained power 
because he has found Arielle, he has " realised his 
interior force, the forgotten power that slumbers 
in every soul." This is the main thing; it is not 
the common, everyday intellect, will, emotion that 
will give us an apprehension of a reality that 
stands all tests; it is something that we are con- 



MAETERLINCK 171 

scious of in silence as in " The Treasure of the 
Humble," in ecstasy as in " Pelleas et Melisande," 
in wisdom and justice as in " Monna Vanna." To 
those who do not know, Merlin is a bad magician, 
just as Marco is a heartless philosopher; but he 
has only " done a little sooner what they will do 
later," for the age is on the dawn of a spiritual 
enlightenment. The world waits for clear day ; 
a few young men now dream dreams, a few old men 
see visions, but the time is approaching when the 
clouds shall lift that now hang within a little of 
the horizon. In the play Merlin waits for his son 
who is to attain by love; who will achieve more 
than his father just because he is to win by love 
what the other has gained by knowledge. Joy- 
zelle is love, unalloyed, incorruptible, perfect. 
She denies everything that contradicts her intui- 
tion; like Ariane she perceives that the very for- 
bidding of anything renders it necessary; like 
Monna Vanna she scruples at no trial. Unlike 
most people she cannot be influenced by some- 
thing that has no relation to her. 

This is the enforcement of M. Maeterlinck's 
fundamental idea; the laws of life are not to be 
deduced from the apparent circumstances of life; 
they are to be appreciated by intuition; they are 
therefore best known, not by words, by deeds, by 
that which can be seen and heard, but in silence, 



172 MAETERLINCK 

not actively but passively. Such communication 
with the absolute gives one a certain kind of dis- 
position of which the motive power is love and the 
directing power wisdom, but of these the latter is 
the servant of the former. 

Such is an abstract statement of the ideas which 
are at the bottom of M. Maeterlinck's work. 
They are fundamental conceptions, however, and 
on them is based a dramatic art which does not 
seem to have varied very much from the original 
statement. In " The Double Garden " he gives 
us a more recent view in commenting on the drama 
of the present. The action is still unimportant. 
He does not still insist on the principle that there 
should be no external action, but the particular 
acts are not of importance. Pelleas may love his 
brother's wife, Monna Vanna may go to the tent 
of a victorious mercenary, Joyzelle may emulate 
Judith, — certainly all the events have the same 
character, perhaps but a Gallic accident, — but 
in themselves the acts are entirely indifferent and 
might be something else. The dialogue is still 
simple. It does not continue the effort at realism 
which people used to think so funny, but it still 
aims to suggest rather than to state. It carries 
on the action, but its true purpose is to dissemi- 
nate communication of a super-essential character. 
In fact the whole aim is to attune the modern mind 



MAETERLINCK 173 

to an appreciation of the mystical, to get it to be 
direct and to disregard circumstance. 

A good deal in M. Maeterlinck's dramas has 
been held to be symbolic. I cannot attach much 
importance to the opinion. A symbol is not an 
effective mode of expression. Unless a symbol in 
long process of time, or otherwise, has attached 
itself to our emotional life it is rarely of much im- 
portance. The hearth, the flag, the cross, these 
doubtless are symbols, and of immense power, and 
further they are symbols having what is practi- 
cally accidental connection with the thing they 
symbolise. Hearths are sadly uncommon nowa- 
days, flags present either a fancy or a convention 
of a forgotten heraldry, and the cross is an im- 
mense power even when its historic character is 
forgotten. These symbols have power over us, 
it is true, but chiefly because their extraordinary 
and universal acceptance has associated them in- 
extricably with our moral nature. The symbols 
of men of letters rarely have this power unless 
there be some real likeness at bottom, as in the 
conception of a progress from this world to the 
world to come. Where there is no such reality 
the symbol is fanciful and has little lasting power. 
The symbols of Hawthorne, the scarlet letter, 
Zenobia's flower, have meaning only by the moral 
vitality which they express. 



174 MAETERLINCK 

A symbol, if it be nothing but a symbol, merely 
serves to mystify, to obscure. Arthur Rimbaud' > 
idea that A symbolised blue (or whatever colour 
it was) and the other vowels, other colours, would 
obscure matters if any one paid any attention to 
it, because, although people do attach conceptions 
of colour to sounds or letters, they differ very 
greatly about it, so that symbolism of that sort 
is not expressive, but obscuring. M. Maeterlinck 
has no desire to be obscure: in his essays he tries 
to state very simply and directly his ideas on a 
very inexpressible matter. I remember no sym- 
bols properly so called in his philosophical writ- 
ings, though there are figures for the moment here 
and there. 

The figures and circumstances in his plays, with 
a few exceptions, are not symbolic; they are ex- 
amples, types, concrete cases, which are things 
very different from symbols. They lwe reality, 
they have a real marvellousness, to use his quota- 
tion from Reaumer, instead of a marvellousness 
that is changeful and imaginary. M. Maeter- 
linck himself says that he has long ceased to find 
in this world any marvel more interesting or more 
beautiful than truth, or at least than man's effort 
to know it. And so in his book " Les Abeilles," 
although there is the constant idea in mind that 
in the hive we have a form of life that may give 



MAETERLINCK 175 

us some knowledge of human life, there is nowhere 
any fancy as we may call it, but wherever an 
analogy is perceived it is presented very simply 
and with abundant explanation and limitation. 
" Let us not hasten to draw from these facts con- 
clusions as to the life of man." Yet there is 
throughout that singularly interesting book the 
constant feeling of an analogy that is rarely ex- 
pressed. The bees act under the impulsion of a 
power external to themselves, it would seem, to 
which we cannot give a better name than the spirit 
of the hive. They are aware of this spirit and 
they obey it: but it does not appear that they 
know it intellectually or obey it consciously. M. 
Maeterlinck's representative figures are like the 
bees, they are unconsciously under the domination 
of the spirit of the race, of the destiny of human- 
ity, of the wisdom of life. The feeling leads them 
to strange acts, it is true, but it does lead them. 
Maeterlinck presents them to us and that in a 
form in which we may sympathise with them. 
That is his work as a dramatist. It is not his 
business to preach either by symbol or sermon. 
He is content to present the essential things of 
life as he recognises them. He presents them in 
forms in which, as nearly as may be, those things 
which cannot be spoken can be made evident. 



OUR IDEA OF TRAGEDY 

Some years ago Mr. Courtney delivered three 
lectures at the Royal Institution which he pub- 
lished under the title, "The Idea of Tragedy." 
So far as offering any explanation of the power 
of tragedy in this world, he was not very success- 
ful. The essence of tragedy, thought Mr. Court- 
ney, lay in the conflict presented. But every one 
knows that conflict in itself is not tragic : as com- 
monly thought of, conflict may be tragic and may 
not. Mr. Courtney spoke of the Attic tragedy 
as presenting the conflict of the human will against 
fate, of Shakespearean tragedy as presenting the 
conflict of the human will with the laws that guide 
the universe. When he got to modern times, how- 
ever, his courage failed him : " The Second Mrs. 
Tanqueray " was his ideal, and he saw very clearly 
that there was no conflict there to make tragedy. 
So he abandoned his idea and took a new one: in- 
spired by Ibsen, he added that in modern tragedy 
the main idea is failure to achieve one's mission. 
The first of these ideas was by no means new. 
It will be found in many places in aesthetic litera- 
176 



OUR IDEA OF TRAGEDY 177 

ture. Let me quote a statement of it not so com- 
mon as some others : it has in it some very interest- 
ing criticism of poetry: 

" Say what meant the woes 
By Tantalus entailed upon his race, 
And the dark sorrows of the line of Thebes? 
Fictions in form, but in their substance truth, 
Tremendous truths! familiar to the men 
Of long-past times, nor obsolete in ours. 
Exchange the shepherd's frock of native grey 
For robes with regal purple fringed; convert 
The crook into a sceptre; give the pomp 
Of circumstance, and here the tragic Muse 
Shall find apt subjects for her highest art. 
Amid the groves, under the shadowy hills, 
The generations are prepared; the pangs, 
The internal pangs are ready; the dread strife 
Of poor humanity's afflicted will 
Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny." 

In that passage Wordsworth expresses his idea 
in almost exactly the words of Mr. Courtney, and 
says, too, that this conflict between will and fate, 
the subject of Greek tragedy, is still a power ready 
to the hand of the poet of the day. 

The other notion of tragedy, too, may be found 
in the poetry of our day, notably in that of 



178 OUR IDEA OF TRAGEDY 

Browning, whose tragedy, when he presents us 
with tragedy, generally consists, not so much in 
strife, as in failure to do that which was possible, 
that which one's best nature demanded. It is of 
this form of tragedy he writes in the " Lost 
Leader," where Wordsworth served him as ex- 
ample as he has served me with precept. 

But all this seems to me a little superficial. 
Granted that tragedy consists sometimes of a con- 
flict, a strife, whether between the human will and 
fate, or between humanity and natural law ; some- 
times of a failure to fulfil one's mission, to be what 
one might be, to " live one's own life," according 
to the phrase of the day or the day before yester- 
day, — it is still a question why these matters 
should affect us as tragedy does affect us. That 
is my interest: literature or art, tragedy or any 
other element in it is vitally important to us, only 
as it affects, touches, moves us. And any theory 
of tragedy, to take any real part in our thinking 
and feeling, must make clearer to us why we are 
moved, or how, in order that we may appreciate, 
in the tragedies that we see, the things that are 
really strong and true. 

It may first, however, be a matter of interest 
to some unsophisticated souls who have no theory 
on the subject, and have often enjoyed tragedies 
keenly without any, to know why we should wish 



OUR IDEA OF TRAGEDY 179 

to discuss the idea of tragedy in the drama of our 
day. Why the idea of tragedy rather than the 
idea of farce or of comedy or any other idea? 
Or even why talk of such abstractions at all? 

Let me explain why nobody should be without a 
theory of tragedy. I may add that I have already 
presented the matter to the public, to the accept- 
ance, unfortunately, of no one that I ever heard 
of, and to the utter rejection of one competent 
authority on the drama. If I do not endeavour 
to controvert the opinions of this latter learned 
critic, it is not because I do not respect them. It 
is because the spectacle of two academic theorists 
disputing on the matter of tragedy — two budge 
doctors of the Stoic fur disputing over the fit of 
a buskin — would be inharmoniously humorous. 
So I must bid her farewell (ave atque vale!), my 
fair theorist with her " tragic blame " and so 
forth. I shall never convert her — perhaps no one 
else — but I shall enjoy tragedy all the same in my 
own way, more, I hope, than it is possible to do in 
hers. 

We may well enough discuss the idea of tragedy 
in the drama of our day, or of any other, because 
by the pretty general consent of mankind, or that 
part of it that cares for letters, tragedy is re- 
garded as the highest and noblest literary form. 
A great tragedy stands higher in the estimation 



180 OUR IDEA OF TRAGEDY 

of the world than a great lyric or a great novel. 
Aristotle considered tragedy the crowning achieve- 
ment of the human intellect, though the Greeks 
in general gave the first place to Homer. The 
English world considers Shakespeare the greatest 
author of all times, though Keats thought that the 
epic was the truly great form and Poe the lyric. 
These are differences of opinion and the question 
is not very important : some of the world's master- 
pieces are tragedies and some are not. In the 
drama, however, tragedy easily holds the most im- 
portant place. We like to laugh at a farce, to be 
thrilled at a melodrama, to be charmed at a 
comedy, — and we may not like a tragedy as much 
as these things. But generally people admit that 
it is greater. It may be too great for us at some 
given time, — there will be plenty of evenings when 
we had rather go to some bright comedy or some 
exciting melodrama, or even to the vaudeville or 
the music hall, if it comes to that, as it often does, 
— than to any tragedy ever written. But that is 
just as we do not always want to read the very 
best literature, do not always want to be hearing 
classic music, do not always want to be looking 
at the Sistine Madonna, say ; do not always want 
to wear our best clothes and sit in the parlour. 
We acknowledge pretty generally that tragedy is 
the great thing, though we may not be always in 



OUR IDEA OF TRAGEDY 181 

the mood for it. Few persons of taste can experi- 
ence profoundly the emotion of a great tragedy 
and hold that any other dramatic form is equally 
great. 

This theoretic view we might present on the 
basis of current facts. That is, practically all 
the great plays of which we have been speaking are 
tragedies. We may not feel quite sure just what 
is conveyed by the term tragedy, but we can gen- 
erally tell one when we see it, if only by the simple 
fact that the chief figure dies at the end, or at 
least comes to an end in the particular world in 
which we know him, which is much the same thing. 
There is nothing essentially noble in death, I sup- 
pose, nor is death on the stage always tragic, but 
we do have this particular ending in " Cyrano " 
and " L'Aiglon," in " Die versunkene Glocke " 
and " Es lebe das Leben," in " The Second Mrs. 
Tanqueray," in " Pelleas et Melisande," though 
not in " Candida," presumably. 

And if the greatest of our modern plays have 
the same purpose as the greatest plays of the old 
Athenian days, of the great Elizabethan time, of 
the French classic period ; why, it is worth our while 
to spend a time in studying out their essential 
characteristic, if it be only that we may be sure 
to gain from these plays the highest form of 
pleasure, that we do not get too much interested 



182 OUR IDEA OF TRAGEDY 

in minor matters, but find out in them what is 
best. 

For it is well to remark that there is no especial 
importance in the abstract definition of the term 
<s tragedy " or of any other term in aesthetics. 
That is in itself a matter of slight moment for us. 
There is, it is true, intense pleasure in speculating 
on aesthetic subjects for those who like it (as I do), 
just as there is intense pleasure in speculating over 
any other point in psychology, or any other 
science. But that is something for the lover of 
speculation, not for the lover of literature : it has, 
as such, no more to do with the appreciation of 
the drama than any other kind of speculation. 
Many people have an intuitive delight at fine 
things on the stage, which is far more intense than 
the reasoned pleasure of a cut-and-dried critic. 
It is not for the importance of the definition that 
it is worth while to go over the subject. 

No, it is for a more practical reason. It is 
that we may have a notion of the true sources of 
pleasure, or, rather, of the sources of the truest 
pleasure. A dozen people will go to the same play 
and enjoy a dozen different things. One had eyes 
for the costumes, another for the stage-settings, 
another was carried away by the sweet smile of the 
actress, another got " a great moral lesson " (I 
suppose there must be such people, or the matter 



OUR IDEA OF TRAGEDY 18S 

would not figure in the advertisements), another 
was delighted at the careful dramatic construc- 
tion, another enjoyed the fine delivery of the poet's 
lines (that couldn't have been in America, unless 
perhaps it was the Chorus in " Henry V."), an- 
other was immensely impressed somehow in a way 
he could not explain. If we are one of these and 
talk to some of the others, and find that we have 
really missed something worth while, — or, to put 
it more simply, if we find, on reading a criticism 
the next morning, that there was more than met 
our eye, — why, then we may feel as though 
we had not got from the play all that was there. 
And if we go again we shall perhaps aim to get 
the true thrill, and look out especially for it. 
Our friend who said of " Cyrano de Bergerac " 
that " The most popular play of the final decade 
of the century presents no problem whatever, and 
avoids any criticism of life," was one who looked 
in " Cyrano " for problems and criticism of life, 
because he thought that a great play ought to 
have those things. A problem, in the sense in 
which people say that Pinero deals with problems, 
" Cyrano " has not, and a good thing, too. And 
as for a criticism of life, it certainly does not have 
that in potted form. Those things it does not 
have ; what it does have is better worth while than 
either. But the point is that such a critic does 



184 OUR IDEA OF TRAGEDY 

not get from " Cyrano M even that which it has, 
because he looks for something it had not, which, 
to his mind, was the real thing. 

Now with tragedy it is commonly supposed that 
there is something especial about it which influ- 
ences all men ; that human nature is such as to be 
susceptible to this something, which appears in all 
sorts of forms, always different, but always hav- 
ing upon the souls of men the same moving effect. 
Just what this something is, the critics have found 
it hard to say. Just what is the moving effect 
that it has, has been occasion of various explana- 
tion. But it is the pretty general opinion that in 
all tragedy there is a single something, and that 
people are and have been affected by it in much 
the same way. It is not necessary that this 
should be the case. The Athenians were very dif- 
ferent from us. It might be that there were 
things about their tragedies that have no especial 
effect upon us, and that we enjoy things to which 
they paid small attention. With the Elizabethan 
drama there is no doubt of the matter; Shake- 
speare's audiences cared greatly for things which 
are even distasteful to us, and we enjoy things 
which they hardly noticed. But these things are 
minor matters ; the real tragedy is the same to-day 
that it was in Shakespeare's day, that it was in 
the time of the Greeks. If, then, we see some 



OUR IDEA OF TRAGEDY 185 

great and common quality in all great tragedy, 
if we see some great and common quality in human 
nature now and two thousand years ago, and if 
the common quality of great tragedy seems to 
bear some relation to the quality of human nature, 
far more if it seem to be a natural cause of it, — 
why, then we may well believe that the success of 
a great tragedy, the existence in it of a lasting 
appeal to mankind, comes not from accident nor 
from art, but from the presence of the truly 
tragic quality which moved the Athenians in the 
days when JEschylus presented " Prometheus 
Bound," which was felt when " Hamlet " was just 
put on the stage, just as it is felt to-day in not 
a few pieces which for minor reasons we cannot 
compare with those masterpieces of the human 
mind. 

To talk over this question is to attune ourselves 
to it. It is not a matter of definition which one 
may read in a book and learn by heart. It is a 
matter of looking into one thing or another and 
trying to feel keenly what is there. It is doubt- 
less the case that some people feel artistic beauty 
keenly with no sense of why or wherefore, and it 
is probably the case also that other people feel 
artistic beauty, just as keenly but in a somewhat 
different way, with more consciousness of causes 
and reasons. Both kinds of enjoyment are good 



186 OUR IDEA OF TRAGEDY 

if both be intense and genuine. A person who 
enjoys keenly, with no idea of why, has usually 
more artistic appreciation than the person who 
thinks much or reasons. But both may enjoy 
more keenly by training, or, in this case, by talk- 
ing or thinking over the matters in question and 
discussing the characteristics that are of interest. 

The first and simplest idea of tragedy is of a 
play with an unhappy ending. That is not very 
abstruse, but it is characteristic of all tragedies — 
Greek, Elizabethan, French, modern — what more 
would you have? 

Why, this much more, a knowledge of why an 
unhappy ending should be pleasing to us, why we 
should think it delightful to see an unhappy end- 
ing, — in fact, whether every unhappy ending is 
pleasing to us, — why any one should call the writ- 
ing of a play with an unhappy ending the top 
achievement of the human intellect? In other 
words, is not this unhappy ending something 
necessary to tragedy, perhaps, but not the essen- 
tial characteristic? In logic a quality always to 
be found, and yet not essential, is called an insep- 
arable accident. For instance, it is in England 
an inseparable accident with a clergyman that he 
wears a white tie, and yet this costume has no es- 
sential connection with his holy calling. Perhaps 
the true and essential tragic quality necessitates 



OUR IDEA OF TRAGEDY 187 

an unhappy ending as far as the chief character 
is concerned, and yet that unhappy ending is not 
itself the essentially tragic thing. In fact this 
is almost necessarily the case, for in a tragedy 
we feel the tragic quality long before the end, and 
therefore it cannot be the end only that has the 
tragic quality. 

And, even if it could rationally be the case, the 
unhappiness of the end would hardly be a sufficient 
explanation, for we should still want to know why 
the end seemed to us unhappy. A tragic ending 
is often the death of the hero. But death is not 
necessarily unhappy — in a large way, that is. To 
those immediately concerned it is always a cause 
of unhappiness, it is true. But death is a neces- 
sity, and we would not, even if we could, avoid it ; 
even M. MetchnikofF agrees to that. . It is the 
natural, the appropriate end of our life here. It 
is often not tragic at all, but triumphant, glo- 
rious. Why is such and such a death unhappy? 
The word merely begs the question and puts us on 
a new inquiry no easier than the old. 

So those who like to speculate on such matters 
have thought of other reasons, and a good many 
other definitions and descriptions of the idea of 
tragedy have been put forward. I shall not deal 
with them for many reasons, one of which is that 
it would take a whole book instead of the tail-end 



188 OUR IDEA OF TRAGEDY 

of one, and another, that it is more amusing to 
hear a man talk of what he thinks himself, than of 
what other people think. 

It is the general opinion — and a very natural 
one — that, in trying to determine the nature of 
the tragic quality, we must find something which 
does not belong to the drama alone. We use the 
word " tragic " far too widely to confine ourselves 
to anything to be found onry in dramatic form. 
If it were for no other reason than that the drama 
represents life, we might say that whatever is 
effective in a large way in the drama will be an 
element effective in life as well. But then, also, 
we use the word, half figuratively perhaps, but 
still broadly. In all forms of literature we have 
what we may call tragedy, and in life as well. 
Indeed, if we were going into a general theoretical 
consideration, we ought to go far beyond the 
narrow limits of the drama; all literature, all art 
we ought to examine, history, lif e we ought to con- 
sider to find the essential of the tragic quality. 

Looking on the matter, without confining our- 
selves necessarily to literature, tragedy seems to 
depend largely upon a sense on our part of in- 
soluble mystery or strangeness, in some action or 
bit of life that we are viewing. Such a sense 
everybody must have very often had in viewing 
life, art, literature. Let us consider a case or 



OUR IDEA OF TRAGEDY 189 

two ; take the example of Heinrich the Bell-caster, 
he whose love of art led him away from his home 
to a mountain-top; led him to desert his wife for 
a mountain-spirit; led him finally to that point 
where his wife sought refuge beneath the waters 
of the mountain tarn, while his mountain-spirit 
vanished away to the home of the Nickelmann. 
Here would be a tragedy entirely aside from Hein- 
rich's dying. It would be a tragedy surely, even 
if he were left alive, because we can see how life 
would continue with him. And why a tragedy? 
Can we analyse it? For one thing, we may note 
that we have here a pretty general motive, the 
contest between the life of art and the everyday 
life of home, the contest that finds expression now- 
adays in all sorts of forms, notably in d'Annun- 
zio's " Giaconda " and Sudermann's " Heimat," 
or in the figure of Marchbanks in " Candida.'* 
The thing is this: here is Art, the pursuit of the 
Beautiful, the care-charmer, the teacher, the great 
amuser of mankind, the recuperator of the weary 
by ever-changing delight — art is all that, is it 
not? a very necessary factor in life, I am sure. 
And yet how often does this very necessary factor 
jar and collide with and crush that other very 
necessary factor, namely, the simple, plain, good 
life of the home, of morality, of every day. And 
vice versa. Is there not an instinctive contrast 



190 OUR IDEA OF TRAGEDY 

between the idea of the artist and the idea of the 
father, the citizen, the respectable everyday man? 
There certainly is, although we may get over it by 
thinking we ought to, and that there should be 
any such contrast, that there should be a conflict, 
as it were, between these two important elements 
in life, that they should seem inharmonious, is 
surely, to me at least, a very strange thing, a 
matter not yet solved and made plain to us. Hence 
pictures of this strife, if they be broad and gen- 
eral, give us the tragic element. If they be well 
done they impress us powerfully, because they 
thrust us into a region where we are afraid, where 
we cannot reckon upon results, where we cannot 
answer the pressing questions which come, but 
have simply to acknowledge that we do not know. 
Not that everything that we do not understand 
is tragic. There are many things that we do not 
understand at all, although we always behave as 
though we did, namely, those things that are a 
great joy to us. The nature of love, for instance, 
is very imperfectly understood by us, yet happy 
love is not tragic, because, though we do not pene- 
trate to its depths, it seems all right and precisely 
what it should be. It does not seem to us a mys- 
tery, it seems very natural and necessary, and, in- 
deed, when we get used to it, an everyday affair. 
The normal course of love is like the normal course 



OUR IDEA OF TRAGEDY 191 

of many other things : the question of comprehen- 
sion, of understanding, simply never comes up in 
regard to them, we do not try to understand them, 
we see that they work to the advantage of man- 
kind, that they are in harmony with life as we look 
at it, that we could not make them better in any 
detail, and so, whether we grasp them intellectu- 
ally or not, we do not trouble ourselves about 
them. And yet sometimes even happy love, since 
we have spoken of it, has its tragic element. I 
spoke a few pages back of Mr. Sothern's presenta- 
tion of " Romeo and Juliet." One of the most 
beautiful moments in the play, and yet the most 
pitiful and the most tragic, was that scene at the 
Capulet feast, where these two who loved at first 
sight first are conscious that they love. It is not 
that we know what is about to happen to them 
that gives us a thrill. No, it is simply the strange 
sight of these two, their souls in their eyes, mov- 
ing mechanically in the world of masquers, Juliet 
in the dance, Romeo by the wall, with life to them 
a totally different thing from what it was a mo- 
ment before. Certainly a very strange concep- 
tion, and well calculated to stagger any one with- 
out great indifference or great confidence in the 
order of Nature and in her always proceeding in 
the very best way. Still, as a rule, such situations 
are not conceived of as tragic. 



192 OUR IDEA OF TRAGEDY 

Another great mass of circumstances is not 
tragic, even though it presents us with most note- 
worthy inconsistencies or incongruities. This is 
where the circumstances are trivial or superficial. 
Matters of this sort are not tragic, but comic. 
The foundation of the Ludicrous is often said to 
be the incongruous, and the incongruous is that 
which for the moment is inconsistent. And the 
inconsistent is something that we cannot for the 
moment harmonise in our thoughts or render com- 
prehensible. The ludicrous often, indeed always, 
depends upon the point of view. Thus a dignified 
gentleman walking on the street steps on the ice 
or upon a piece of orange-peel and falls down. It 
is very funny to some people, but the man himself 
rarely perceives the humour of it. It is incon- 
gruous, the contrast between his dignity and his 
lack of dignity. For the moment the mind of the 
spectator refuses to correlate the ideas. But in 
a minute the situation becomes perfectly natural; 
pitiable, but not tragic. Experience steps in and 
tells us that there is nothing incongrous or incon- 
sistent. And the matter ceases to be ludicrous. 
If you come home and tell some one that you saw 
a dignified man fall down upon the ice, you can- 
not, probably, make it seem funny to anybody else 
because, although it is incongruous to them as it 
was to you, so far as the minor aspects of the 



OUR IDEA OF TRAGEDY 193 

matter are concerned, the mind is not taken by 
surprise, and regards the matter as one of the 
necessary and normal results of winter. 

Other cases, however, present more difficulty in 
discrimination. There are not a few cases where 
the same thing may seem tragic or humorous. 
The classic example, as we may say, is that of 
Mr. Shandy and My Uncle Toby. Here were two 
brothers who loved each other devotedly, and yet 
were totally unable to understand each other. As 
Sterne handles the situation, fixing attention on 
minor points, veiling any deeper feelings that 
might have been aroused, it is very purely hu- 
morous. But after all, it is not a humorous sit- 
uation if dealt with seriously. Two beings bound 
together by close ties, loving each other but never 
able to understand each other, something like that 
is the situation on which Ibsen built " The Doll's 
House." The same thing may often be comic and 
tragic to different people. The nose of Cyrano 
de Bergerac was intensely humorous to many 
about him: it was so incongruous that it was 
enough to make anybody laugh who could keep 
out of the way of the owner. But to Cyrano him- 
self it was far from humorous, and it shows the 
power of the dramatist that he makes us forget 
the ridiculous possibilities, so that the figure of 
Cyrano is really a noble one. 



194 OUR IDEA OF TRAGEDY 

Incongruity is merely inconsistency, merely 
that we cannot comprehend two things in one 
thought. Incomprehensibleness is at the bottom 
of tragedy. We must have something great, 
something of importance, and then, if the incon- 
gruity, the inconsistency, be brought out strongly 
and poignantly, the thing is done. 

One reason for disagreement as to tragic qual- 
ity is that it often happens that a thing is im- 
portant to one set of people, but not to another. 
Then there will be difference of opinion. For ex- 
ample, the so-called problem-plays of Mr. Pinero. 
These plays are not great tragedies because they 
(and their problems) do not make a very wide 
appeal. For example, " Iris " : the motive of 
" Iris " is that of the weak woman who wants to be 
good but wants more to have an easy, delightful, 
luxurious, lazy time. That motive may be capable 
of tragic force. Such women may have much 
charm and beauty of character, so that in easy 
circumstances they add to the true joy of the 
world. Iris was such a one. She was even more: 
she was — in ways that did not trouble her — good 
and generous. Now, why should such good char- 
acteristics all be overbalanced by this one evil? 
Further, Iris was practically betrayed by her own 
generosity. Why should one's doing a good thing 
lead one inexorably to the doing such wrong 



OUR IDEA OF TRAGEDY 195 

things that one's life is wrecked and other people's 
too? There seems to be, then, the possibility of 
tragedy there, because that is one of the mysteries 
of the human heart and of divine law. But even 
were the motive more strongly worked out, the 
tragedy would not be a great one because, in the 
form in which it comes to us, it is not of wide 
application. I suppose I do not know a single 
Iris myself, and I question whether the average 
man does. I may be able to imagine them readily, 
I may be able to judge that there are not a few 
of them in certain spheres of life. But the ques- 
tion does not come near enough home to me, or 
to most people, for us to call it really tragic. So 
of Mrs. Tanqueray, Mrs. Ebbsmith, and the rest 
of Mr. Pinero's problematic ladies. They are im- 
mensely interesting to themselves and their friends, 
no doubt, but only by great art could they be 
made so vivid to the world at large as to become 
great figures. Alexandre Dumas achieved the 
difficult feat when he created Marguerite Gau- 
tier, La Dame aux Camelias, commonly called by 
us Camille. When I saw the play I was a boy 
in college; it is a season when such motives seem 
more real than in after years. I remember per- 
fectly well standing up in the back of the theatre 
with the tears rolling down my cheeks. In fact 
I remember myself much better than I remember 



196 OUR IDEA OF TRAGEDY 

Marguerite Gautier, though I occasionally stimu- 
late my memory by reading the play over. The 
fact is that she does not have a universal appeal. 

The more important the case, the wider the 
appeal, the more certain of success, — other things 
being equal, — is the tragedy. It is in this way 
that I explain the success of M. Rostand. The 
motive of all his plays is the same. It is not very 
clearly presented. It is usually conceived in a 
spirit that impresses the audience as pessimistic, 
but it is always there and always the same and 
always the strongest motive in the world. It is 
that of the failure of the idealist to attain the 
height of his aspiration. 

In the " Princesse Lointaine " the imaginative 
Rudel loves the ideal princess of Tripoli. He dies 
before attaining his ideal, but also before he knows 
what his ideal was worth, save as an ideal. In 
" Cyrano de Bergerac " we have a man who has, 
and who knows that he has, — and we know it too, 
— tremendous powers, but who is never able to 
realise them, who is never able to appear to the 
world as he knows he is. There is that fatal im- 
pediment. Purely typical that is, but every one 
has something of the sort, for it is inherent in 
human nature that the flesh should hold back the 
spirit. In his case the spirit of the man is so 
fine, he is so brilliant, so vigorous, so courageous, 



OUR IDEA OF TRAGEDY 197 

that he carries it all off with a vitality that make* 
us almost forget the tragedy. But it is there all 
the same. In " L'Aiglon " we have the idealist 
once more, the man who has the greatest ideal of 
his time, the finest, noblest, most splendid possi- 
bility, at least, waiting for him, calling insistently, 
beckoning, but he cannot ever reach it, chiefly be- 
cause he cannot even understand what it is. To 
the Due de Reichstadt Napoleon was a man of 
victories and processions and uniforms. He real- 
ises as the play goes on that he cannot even in 
thought rise to the ideal before him, much less 
realise it in fact. He is noble because he even 
then clings to his ideal because it is an ideal. A 
tragic figure he is on the field of Wagram, re- 
lapsing into the pathetic when in the last act he 
becomes, as one might say, more of a child than 
ever. And this constant defeat of the idealist 
in this world I take to be a matter not thoroughly 
understood by us. It is true that the poets offer 
their explanations, Tennyson with his 

" O me ! for why is all around us here 
As if some lesser god had made the world, 
But had not force to shape it as he would, 
Till the High God behold it from beyond, 
And enter it and make it beautiful ! " 

and Browning with his constant optimism: 



198 OUR IDEA OF TRAGEDY 

" Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, 
Or what's a heaven for ? " 

But I cannot say that the explanations make it 
very clear to me. Still it is the incomprehensible 
nature of the thing that makes it striking. It 
masters us ; if we understood it, we should master 
it. If we understood it thoroughly, and saw that 
it was just as we should imagine it, or as we 
might ourselves have arranged it, or even as we 
acknowledge just, then we should not think it any- 
thing very much out of the common run. It 
would make us cynical, perhaps, or hopeless, but 
it would not be the medicina mentis that trag- 
edy is. 

Such — at any rate let me assume it, for the 
time, in spite of conflicts, missions, tragic blames, 
and anything else — such is tragedy always, a pur- 
suing of some of the strange and unexplainable 
courses of life. The finer and nobler the actors, 
the greater and more general the evil that they 
do not escape, the greater the tragedy. We see 
it in the Greek drama, and we see it in the Eliza- 
bethan. In the " Prometheus " we have the friend 
of man, and therefore one who must endure a life 
of torture, as so many friends of man have endured 
since his day. In " Hamlet " we have the man in 
whom the godlike reason was stronger than in any 



OUR IDEA OF TRAGEDY 199 

other man of his time, and who therefore fell a vic- 
tim to an unscrupulous politician. And the same 
thing is in modern plays, as we have seen, whether 
presented in the beautiful and glittering forms of 
romance or in the more immediate forms of every- 
day life. 

There can be little doubt that the element is 
there, — may be found, I believe, in every great 
tragedy in the drama, literature, in life. But 
even if so the real question is : Is it this that thrills 
and holds us, when we read the drama or see the 
play? Is it this that impresses us with what we 
call the Tragic ? 

To give a sort of answer to this question I must 
be a little pedantic. We all know the position of 
Aristotle in the intellectual world, how he domi- 
nated the thought of man for centuries and is to- 
day as wise as ever, though not so dictatorial. He 
thought about almost everything in his day and he 
did not disdain the drama. He viewed the Athe- 
nian drama of his time just as he viewed the 
science, the oratory, the politics, the constitutional 
principles, and everything else. He analysed its 
power and stated it in words that have given the 
theorists great opportunities. 

" Tragedy," he says, " is an imitation of an 
action that is serious, complete, and of a certain 
magnitude; in language embellished with every 



200 OUR IDEA OF TRAGEDY 

kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being 
found in separate parts of the play; in the form 
of action not of narrative, through pity and awe 
effecting the proper Katharsis of these emotions." 

This word Katharsis, it seems generally agreed, 
was a medical term, meaning much the same thing 
as our word purgative. Tragedy is a purge to the 
moral nature, it would appear, is the idea of Aris- 
totle. It is an influence upon our moral nature, 
a purifying, strengthening, reviving influence. It 
does away with certain evils that annoy our daily 
life. Its very bitterness — like the purge in " Pil- 
grim's Progress " — has this effect upon us, and 
we listen to a tragedy with the same acrid sense of 
tonic improvement that we feel when we are get- 
ting over a cold, say, or an illness. That seems 
to be Aristotle's view : I take it to be pretty sound. 
It shows that two thousands years ago he noticed 
what we may notice to-day. 

Certain things in human life have this effect 
upon us, though they commonly work in rather 
a drawn-out way, and in art, in so far as art 
represents life. In tragedy we appreciate Man 
as Pope thought of him, that much-neglected poet 
who said so many things so much better than any 
one else could ever say them. Pope saw the fact, 
though he had not the artistic feeling to put it in 
any but an intellectual way: 



OUR IDEA OF TRAGEDY 201 

" Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, 
A being darkly wise and rudely great; 
With too much knowledge for the sceptic side, 
With too much weakness for the stoic's pride, 
He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest, 
In doubt to deem himself a god or beast, 
In doubt his mind or body to prefer, 
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err ; 
Alike in ignorance, his reason such, 
Whether he thinks too little or too much; 
Chaos of thought and passion all confused, 
Still by himself abused and disabused ; 
Created half to rise and half to fall, 
Great Lord of all things, yet a prey to all. 
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled, 
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world 1 " 

The glory to the eye of faith, but the jest to 
the comedian and the riddle to those in whom the 
spirit is tuned to the note of tragedy. 

Or in other words, when we have put before us 
one of those poignant scenes, or situations, or mo- 
ments, or figures of human life, where good and 
evil, strength and weakness are so inextricably 
mixed, where all that might, that should turn out 
so well, does turn out so ill, then we cannot com- 
prehend intellectually, do not try to, we can sim- 
ply receive the impression emotionally or spiritu- 



202 OUR IDEA OF TRAGEDY 

ally, we cannot but be seized by a mixture of pity 
and awe, as Aristotle says. And that feeling is 
our feeling for the Tragic. 

It leaves us calmed and quieted. Things seem 
a little different. Everyday matters at which we 
were so hot, for the moment are small and petty. 
We feel in a confused way that life is something 
fine, big, and noble, and that we ourselves are not 
the only people of importance. It does not last, 
of course; we shall again be angered, ridiculous, 
blunderers, but for the time we are satisfied. We 
are willing to continue our lives in their silly indi- 
viduality, feeling that we may confidently trust 
in a power whose detailed purposes have not been 
explained to us. 

Such in its result is the general effect of the 
greatest art. It is of great art that that figure 
of the beautiful youth that Emerson mentions is 
typical, Phosphorus, whose aspect is such that all 
persons who look upon it become silent. 



APPENDIX. 

PERFORMANCE OR PUBLICATION 

In the following lists are the dates of the first 
performance or publication of the plays of our 
dramatists. They do not pretend to do more than 
to show £he place of each play in the author's 
career, and to give a general idea of his activity 
and of public interest in his work. Many matters 
of curious interest are therefore omitted. This 
is especially the case with Bernard Shaw and 
M. Maeterlinck, whose plays have been performed 
at all sorts of times and places, but not, as a rule, 
immediately on writing. Performances in coun- 
tries or languages other than the author's have 
been noted, but without idea of completeness, to 
give an idea of the way the author has come before 
the public. The facts come wherever possible 
from the published texts of the authors, but in 
other cases from periodicals, newspapers, dramatic 
lists, etc. 



203 



EDMOND ROSTAND 

(Unless especially mentioned, the place of produc- 
tion was Paris) 

1894. May 21. Theatre Francais. Les Ro- 
manesques : Comedie en trois actes en vers. 
Given at the Empire Theatre, New York, 
February 24, 1901, by the American 
Academy of Dramatic Arts, under the 
name of " The Fantastics." It has also 
been given of late in German at the Irving 
Place Theatre. 

1895. April 5. Theatre de la Renaissance. La 
Princesse Lointaine: Piece en quatre 
actes en vers. The part of Melissande 
was created by Mme. Sarah Bernhardt. 

1897. April 14. Theatre de la Renaissance. 
La Samaritaine: Evangile en trois ta- 
bleaux. The part of Photine by Mme. 
Bernhardt. The piece is said to have been 
very successful, and, I understand, has 
several times been revived during Holy 
Week. 

1897. December 28. Theatre de la Porte Saint- 
Martin. Cyrano de Bergerac: Comedie 
Heroique en cinq actes en vers. The most 
205 



206 



APPENDIX 



1900. 



brilliant theatrical success of the dec- 
ade. In the United States it was given 
by Mr. Richard Mansfield at the Garden 
Theatre, New York, October 3, 1898. In 
London, at Wyndham's Theatre, with Mr. 
Wyndham as Cyrano, April 19, 1900, it 
did not seem to hit the public taste. It 
has been given, in a translation by Ludwig 
Fulda, in many cities of Germany and 
Austria, and in New York also. Given in 
French at the Garden Theatre, New York, 
December 10, 1900, by Mme. Bernhardt 
and M. Coquelin. 

March 15. Theatre Sarah Bernhardt. 
L'Aiglon: Drame en six actes en vers. 
First given in the United States at the 
Academy of Music, Baltimore, October 15, 
1900. At Her Majesty's Theatre, Lon- 
don, June 1, 1901. In French at the 
Garden Theatre, New York, November £6, 
1900, by Mme. Bernhardt and M. Coquelin. 



GERHARDT HAUPTMANN 

(Unless especially mentioned, the place of produc- 
tion was Berlin) 

1889. October 20. Lessing-Theater, under the 
auspices of the society Die freie Biihne. 
Voe Sonnenaufgang : Soziales Drama. 
The production of this play was an im- 
mensely exciting event, being regarded as 
a battle between the new school and the 
old. Like most of the plays following, it 
has been given at the Irving Place Theatre, 
New York. 

1890. June 1. Lessing-Theater. Das Friedens- 
fest: Ein Familienkatastrophe. This play 
had already appeared in the newspaper 
Die freie Biihne. 

1891. January 11. Deutsches Theater. Ein- 
same Menschen : Drama. This had been 
presented shortly before by the Freie 
Biihne. It has been given in German in 
New York, by Mr. Conried, of course, and 
in English as " Lonely Lives " at the Em- 
pire Theatre December 11, 1902, by the 
American Academy of Dramatic Arts. 

207 



208 APPENDIX 

1892. January 16. Deutsches Theater. Col- 
lege Crampton: Komodie in funf akten. 

1893. February 26. Die freie Biihne. Die 
Weber: Schauspiel aus den vierziger 
Jahren. The play was to have been given 
at the Deutsches Theater, but was forbid- 
den, and so not presented there till Septem- 
ber 25, 1894. It has been given in Paris 
as " Les Tisserands " at M. Antoine's 
Theatre Libre. 

1893. September 21. Deutsches Theater. Das 
Biberpelz : Eine Diebskomodie. 

1893. November 14. Konigliches Schauspiel- 
haus. Hanneles Himmelfahrt; Traum- 
dichtung in zwei Theilen. There were diffi- 
culties in regard to the presentation of this 
play also. It appeared the next year at 
the Theatre Libre, Paris, and also at the 
Fifth Avenue Theatre, New York. 

1896. January 4. Deutsches Theater. Florian 
Geyer. As first presented this play was a 
failure, to the great chagrin of the author, 
who had put his best work into it. He 
revised it subsequently, and it was given 
at the Lessing-Theater, October 22, 1904, 
but I have not been able to get a satisfac- 
tory account of the nature of the revision 
or of its success. 

1896. December 2. Deutsches Theater. Die 
versunkene Glocke. This play has been 
Hauptmann's great public success; it at 



APPENDIX 209 

once stirred up criticism and controversy 
in Germany, and became more widely 
known than anything he had yet done. It 
was given to crowded houses by Frau 
Agnes Sorma at the Irving Place Theatre, 
New York, April 29, 1897, and afterward. 
It did not appear in English, however, 
until December 81, 1899, at the Hollis 
Street Theatre, Boston, where it was pre- 
sented by Mr. Sothern. 

1898. November 5. Deutsches Theater. Fuhr- 
mann Henschel: Schauspiel in funf 
Akten. 

1900. February 3. Deutsches Theater. Schluck 
und Jatj : Spiel zu Scherz und Schimpf . 

1900. December 21. Deutsches Theater. Michael 
Kramer. 

1901. November 27. Deutsches Theater. Der 
rote Hahn : Tragikomodie in vier Akten. 

1902. November 29. Hof Burgtheater, Wien. 
Der arme Heinrich : Eine deutsche Sage. 

1903. October 31. Deutsches Theater. Rose 
Bernd : Schauspiel in f iinf Auf zugen. 



HERMANN SUDERMANN 

(Unless especially mentioned, the place of produc- 
tion was Berlin) 

1889. November 27. Lessing-Theater. Die 
Ehre: Schauspiel in vier Akten. Often 
given in German. In English ( " Honour " ) 
at the Criterion Theatre, New York, Jan- 
uary 26, 1905, by the American Academy 
of Dramatic Art. 

1891. November 5. Lessing-Theater. Sodom's 
Ende: Drama in fiinf Akten. This play 
also has been widely given in German. The 
first performance that I have noted in 
English is " The Man and His Picture," 
Great Queen Street, London, March 8, 
1903. 

1893. January 7. Lessing-Theater. Heimat: 
Schauspiel in vier Akten. This is the most 
successful play that has been written of 
late. It holds the stage better than any- 
thing even of Rostand or Hauptmann. 
The character of Magda has attracted 
the greatest actresses of the day — Mme. 
Bernhardt, Signora Duse, Mrs. Patrick 
Campbell, Mrs. Fiske, Mme. Mojeska, as 
well as the chief German actresses. It has 
210 



APPENDIX 211 

been given almost everywhere, often under 
the name of " Magda." 

1894. October 6. Lessing-Theater. Die Schmet- 
terlingsscheacht. Eine Komodie in vier 
Akten. 

1895. November 11. Hof Burgtheater, Wien. 
Das Glttck im Winkel : Schauspiel in drei 
Akten. 

IftQfi Oth <* i Lessing-Theater, Berlin; ) 
| Hof Burgtheater, Wien. j 
Morituri: Drei Einakter; Teja; Fritz- 
chen ; Das Ewig Mannijche. 

1898. January 15. Deutsches Theater. Jo- 
hannes: Tragodie in fiinf Akten und 
einem Vorspiel. 

1899. January 21. Deutsches Theater. Die 
drei Reihefeder: Ein dramatisches Ge- 
dicht in fiinf Akten. 

1900. October 5. Deutsches Theater. Johannes- 
feuer. Given in EngHsh as " St. John's 
Fire " at the Empire Theatre, New York, 
by the American Academy of Dramatic 
Arts, December 1, 1904. 

1902. February 10. Deutsches Theater. Es 
lebe das Leben: Drama in fiinf Akten. 
Given at the Garden Theatre, New York, 
October 23, 1902. At the New Theatre, 
London, June 24, 1903. 

1903. October 3. Lessing-Theater. Der 
Sturmgeselee Sokrates: Komodie in 
vier Akten. 



ARTHUR WING PINERO 

(Unless especially mentioned, the place of produc- 
tion was London) 

1877. October 6. Globe Theatre. Two Hun- 
dred a Year : A Comedietta in One Act. 

1879. September 20. Lyceum Theatre. Daisy's 
Escape. 

1880. June 5. Folly Theatre. Hester's Mys- 
tery: A Comedietta in One Act. 

1880. September 18. Lyceum Theatre. By- 
gones : A Comedy in One Act. 

1880. November 5. Theatre Royal, Manchester. 
The Money Spinner: A Drama in Two 
Acts. This was the first play of Mr. 
Pinero's to attract much attention. The 
production at Manchester was praised, 
and the play was brought to London, where 
it was given, January 8, 1881, by Mr. and 
Mrs. Kendal, Mr. John Hare, and others. 
It was considered worthy of note at the 
time by an accomplished critic that " Mr 
Pinero invents his own plots and writes his 
own dialogue," a remark very significant 
as to the English stage in 1880, a year 
212 



APPENDIX 213 

in which "Forbidden Fruit" and "The 
Guv'nor " were the popular successes. 
1881. October 27. Folly Theatre. Imprudence. 

1881. December 29. St. James Theatre. The 
Squire : Given the next year, October 10, 
at Daly's, New York. 

1882. March 24. Court Theatre. The Rector: 
A Play in Four Acts. 

1882. October 31. Toole's Theatre. Boys and 
Girls. Mr. Pinero was still on the stage 
and took a part in this play. 

1883. July 30. Prince of Wales' Theatre, Liver- 
pool. The Rocket: A Comedy in Three 
Acts. Given December 10, 1883, at the 
Gaiety Theatre, London. 

1883. November 24. Haymarket Theatre. Lords 
and Commons : A Comedy in Four Acts. 

1884. January 12. Globe Theatre. Low 
Water: A Comedy in Three Acts. 

1884. Written at this time, but not presented. 
The Weaker Sex. It was to have been 
given at the Court Theatre, but was sup- 
planted by the following more noteworthy 
piece. 

1885. March 21. Court Theatre. The Magis- 
trate: A Farce in Three Acts. This is 
a capital piece, though how good one can 
hardly appreciate without comparing it 
with some adaptations from the French of 
the same time. It was remarkably suc- 
cessful (ran for more than a year), so 



214 APPENDIX 

that it determined the general line of the 
Court Theatre for some time. It was 
given at Daly's Theatre, New York, and 
has since been presented all over Europe 
and the English colonies. 
1886. March 27. Court Theatre. The School- 
mistress : A Farce in Three Acts. 

1886. October 23. Saint James' Theatre. The 
Hobby Horse : A Comedy in Four Acts. 

1887. January 27. Court Theatre. Dandy 
Dick: A Farce in Three Acts. Given at 
Daly's Theatre, New York, October 5, of 
the same year. 

1888. March 21. Terry's Theatre. Sweet 
Lavender. With the exception of " The 
Magistrate," this is the most popular of 
Mr. Pinero's earlier plays. Indeed, Mr. 
Winter holds it to be " a thousand times 
better than all his noxious analyses of 
social sores." It was given at Daly's 
Theatre, November 12, 1888, and has been 
seen of late in New York given by Mr. 
Terry, for whom it was originally written. 

1888. September 28. Theatre Royal, Man- 
chester. The Weaker Sex : A Comedy in 
Three Acts. Written some years before, 
but put aside in favour of " The Magis- 
trate." Given at the Court Theatre, 
March 19, 1889. 

1889. April 24. Garrick Theatre. The Prof- 
ligate: A Drama in Four Acts. This 



APPENDIX 215 

play, which was the first strong piece of 
work in the kind wherein Mr. Pinero is 
now most distinguished, did not excite 
especial attention. It was not produced 
in this country until 1894, when people 
had become interested in the author 
through " The Second Mrs. Tanqueray." 

1890. April 23. Court Theatre. The Cabinet 
Minister: A Farce in Four Acts. 

1891. March 7. Garrick Theatre. Lady Boun- 
tiful: A Play in Four Acts. Not en- 
tirely successful, but given in the fall 
(November 16) simultaneously at the 
Lyceum Theatre, New York, and the Bos- 
ton Museum. 

1891. October 24. Terry's Theatre. The 
Times : A Comedy in Four Acts. Of this 
play Mr. Pinero himself writes that " It 
lays bare no horrid social wound, it 
wrangles over no vital problem of inex- 
tricable perplexity." 

1893. March 7. Court Theatre. The Am- 
azons: A Farcical Romance in Three 
Acts. Given at the Lyceum, New York, 
the next year. 

1893. May 27. Saint James' Theatre. The 
Second Mrs. Tanqueray: A Play in 
Four Acts. Given by the Kendals at the 
Star Theatre, New York, October 9, 1893. 
With this play Mr. Pinero begins to be 
considered seriously ; it has been much dis- 



216 APPENDIX 

cussed, and good critics have held it to be 
a great tragedy; a view which, I hope, 
(pp. 93, 94, 176, 195) is quite erroneous. 
Mrs. Patrick Campbell created the part 
of Mrs. Tanqueray, and the part did 
something of the sort in return. There 
have been French and Italian versions 
given in many places, but I do not hear of 
it in Germany. 

1895. March 13. Garrick Theatre. The No- 
torious Mrs. Ebbsmith. A very good 
play. Done by Mr. John Hare, at Ab- 
bey's Theatre, New York, December 23, 
1895. Given September 22, 1899, at the 
Lessing-Theater, Berlin, under the name 
" Die Genossin." 

1895. October 16. Comedy Theatre. The 
Benefit of the Doubt. Given at the 
Lyceum, New York, January 6, 1896. 

1897. March 29. St. James' Theatre. The 
Princess and the Butterfly; or, The 
Fantastics: A Comedy in Five Acts. 
Given at the Lyceum, New York, Novem- 
ber 23, 1897. 

1898. January 30. Court Theatre. Trelawney 
of the Wells: A Comedietta in Four 
Acts. Given at the Lyceum, New York, 
November 22, 1898. 

1899. April 8. Globe Theatre. The Gay Lord 
Quex: A Comedy in Four Acts. Given 
in New York by Mr. Hare a year or so 



APPENDIX 217 

later. Also at the Lessing-Theater, Ber- 
lin, January 13, 1900, where it was pro- 
nounced by the only critic I have noted, 
" reichlich langweilig und . . . ein be- 
dauerliches Zeichen fur das Tiefstand des 
englischen Geschmack." The remark is in 
itself an interesting sign of German taste. 
1901. September 21. Garrick Theatre. Iris: 
A Drama in Five Acts. Given at the 
Criterion Theatre, New York, September 
23, 1902. 

1903. October 8. Duke of York's Theatre. 
Letty: A Drama in Four Acts and an 
Epilogue. Given at the Hudson Theatre, 
New York, September 12, 1904. 

1904. October 9. Wyndham's Theatre. A Wife 
without a Smile: A Comedy in Dis- 
guise. Given at the Criterion Theatre, 
New York, December 19, 1904. 

Some translations or adaptations have 
been omitted. 



GEORGE BERNARD SHAW 

(Unless especially mentioned, the place of produc- 
tion was London) 

1892. Independent Theatre. Widowers' Houses. 

iftcw J Written for the Independent ) ,— 
t Theatre, but not performed, f 
Philanderers; Mrs. Warren's Profes- 
sion. This last was given by the Stage 
Society at the New Lyric Theatre, Jan- 
uary 4, 1902. 

1894. April 21. Avenue Theatre. Arms and 
the Man. Was also given by Mr. Mans- 
field at the Herald Square Theatre, New 
York, September 17, 1894. A few months 
ago, December 8, 1904, given at the 
Deutsches Theater, Berlin, under the name 
of " Helden." 

1894. Written for Mr. Mansfield, but not acted 
at the time. Candida. Given at Car- 
negie Hall, New York, December 9, 1903, 
and at the Court Theatre, on April 26, 
1904. Given at the Konigliches Schau- 
spielhaus, Dresden, November 19, 1903. 

1895. Written but not publicly given. The Man 
of Destiny. Given by the American 

218 



APPENDIX 219 

Academy of Dramatic Arts at the Empire 
Theatre, New York, February 16, 1899, 
and at the Neues Theater, Berlin, Feb- 
ruary 10, 1904, under the name " Der 
Schlachtenlenker." 

1896. Written but not publicly given. You 
Never Can Tell. Given January 9, 
1905, at the Garrick Theatre, New York. 

These seven plays were published in 1898 
as " Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant." 

1897. October 1. Harmanus Bleecker Hall, Al- 
bany. The Devil's Disciple. Also Sep- 
tember 26, 1899, at the Princess of Wales' 
Theatre, and at the Berliner Theater, 
December 1, 1904, under the name " Ein 
Teufelskerl." 

- ~ . Al ( Cjssar and Cleopatra. 

1898. Apparently 1 ~ _» , 
innA f • S Captain Brassbound s 

1899. not given, j ^ 

° { Conversion. 

These three plays were published in 1900 
as " Three Plays for Puritans." 

1903. Published. Man and Superman. 

1904. September 26. Berkeley Lyceum, New 
York. How He Lied to Her Husband. 

1904. October. Court Theatre. John Bull's 
Other Island. 

There have usually, I believe, been semi- 
private performances of Mr. Shaw's plays, 
for the sake of securing stage rights, but 
the dates are not readily obtainable, nor 
would they signify much if obtained. 



STEPHEN PHILLIPS 

1899. Published. Paolo and Feancesca: A 
Tragedy in Pour Acts. 

1900. October 31. Her Majesty's Theatre, Lon- 
don. Heeod : A Tragedy. 

1902. February 1. Her Majesty's Theatre, Lon- 
don. Ulysses: A Drama in a Prologue 
and Three Acts. Also given at the Gar- 
den Theatre, New York, September 14, 
1902. 

1904. Published. The Sin of David. 

1905. Published. Nero. 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 



The dates given, except the last two, are those 
of publication. As the plays were not imme- 
diately performed, I have added a few dates of 
first performances in various countries, but the 
list is very incomplete. 

f L'Intrus. ^ The first two given by 

- RQ J Les Aveugles. I the American Acad- 
] Les Sept f emy of Dramatic Arts 

Princesses. J at the Berkeley Ly- 
ceum, New York, Feb- 
ruary 21, 1893, and 
January 18, 1894, 
respectively. 
1893. Pelleas et Meusande. 

Interieur. Given at the Carnegie 
Aeladine et Palamides. 

Lyceum by the American Academy, 
1894 February 18, 1896. 

La Mort de Tintagiles. Given on the 
Sezessionsbuhne, Berlin, November 12, 
1900. 

1896. Aglavaine et Selysette. v 
221 



APPENDIX 



1901. Ariane et Barbe Bleue; ou, La Deli- 
vrance Inutile. Conte en trois actes. 

1901. S(eur Beatrice. Miracle en trois actes. 

1902. May 17. Nouveau Theatre, Paris. Monna 
Vanna. Piece en trois actes. Given at 
the Konigliches Schauspielhaus, Munich, 
September 27, 1902. It was forbidden in 
London, and in America has been seen only 
in German at the Irving Place Theatre, 
New York. 

1903. May 20. Theatre du Gymnase. Joy- 
zelle : Piece en cinq actes. 



INDEX 



INDEX 



"Abeilles, Les," 174, 175 Arielle in "Joyzelle," 170 

Academy of Dramatic Arts, Arimanes in " Manfred," 136 

American, 205, 207, 210, Aristotle, 180, 199, 200, 202 

219,221 "Arme Heinrich, Der," 58, 
Academy, The French, re- 209 

ception of M. Rostand in- " Arms and the Man," 106- 

to, 12, 14, 90 109, 117, 218 

Addison, 91 Artagnan, D', 22, 23, 24, 26 

JEschylus, 185 Arthur, King, 36 

"Aglavaine et Selysette," Astarte in "Manfred," 136, 

165, 221 138 

"Aiglon, L'," 15, 36, 139, "Aveugles, Les," 159, 162, 

181, 197, 206; its hero, 31, 221 

32, 35, 51, 197 

" Alladine et Palamides," Balzac, 23, 117 

165, 221 Beate in " Es lebe das Le- 
Alladine, 168 ben," 78, 81 

Alma in " Die Ehre," 66, 67, Belasco, Mr. David, 15 

76 Bellangere in "La Mort de 

" Amazons, The," 215 Tintagiles," 168 

" Ambassador, The," 90, 99 " Benefit of the Doubt, The," 

Annunzio, D\ 7, 189 216 

Anna Mahr, in " Einsame Bernard Shaw, see Shaw, 
Menschen," 39, 57 George Bernard 

Antoine, M., 208 Bernhardt, Mme. Sarah, 10, 

"Antony and Cleopatra," 35, 155, 206; in " Magda," 
103 70, 71; as Melissande, 205; 

" Ariane et Barbe Bleue," as Photine, 205 

166, 168, 222 Bertrand in " La Princesse 
Ariane, 166, 167, 171 Lointaine," 19 

225 



226 



INDEX 



"Biberpelz, Das," 40, 208 

Blake, symbolism of, 55 

Boehme, 154 

Booth, Edwin, 140 

Boswell, 13 

" Boys and Girls," 213 

Brand, 55 

Browning, Robert, 36, 127, 

142, 143, 144, 197 
Bulthaupt on Graf Trast, 67 
Burgess, Mr., in "Candida," 

110 
Burgoyne, Gen., in "The 

Devil's Disciple," 118 
Byron, 23, 144; and Rome, 

81 ; his plays, 127 

" Cabinet Minister, The," 215 

"Caesar and Cleopatra," 219 

Caesar, 118 

Camille, 195 

Campbell, Mrs. Patrick, as 
Magda, 70; in " Pelleas et 
M61isande," 164; in "The 
Second Mrs. Tanqueray," 
216 

"Candida," 9, 109-116, 118, 
124, 181, 189, 218 

Candida, 111, 117 

"Captain Brassbound's Con- 
version," 219 

Carlyle, 113, 154 

Chateaubriand, 2 

Cleopatra in "Caesar and 
Cleopatra," 118 

" Comedie Humaine," 23 

Coleridge, 127 

" College Crampton," 41, 208 



" Coriolanus," 43 

Courtney, Mr. W. L., 176, 177 

Craigie, Mrs., 90; and Pi- 

nero, 99, 100 
Criticism, standards of, 1-3; 

theatrical, 6, 8; current, 7; 

dramatic, 8 
Croker, in " Iris," 96 
Crosbie, Mrs., in " Letty," 87 
"Cyrano de Bergerac," 15, 

21, 22, 26, 30, 36, 56, 181, 

183, 196, 205 
Cyrano de Bergerac, 26, 35, 

51, 193, 265; significance, 

22-29 

"Daisy's Escape," 212 

Daly, Augustin, 85 

Daly, Arnold, alluded to, 103 

" Dandy Dick," 214 

Dangers, Lord, in "The 
Profligate," 87 

" Dawn, The," 46 

Deaconess in " Hanneles 
Himmelfahrt," 46 

"Devil's Disciple, The," 219 

Dickens, 23; in "A Tale of 
Two Cities," 47 

" Doll's House, A," 193 

Don Quixote, 33 

"Doom of Devorgoil, The," 
127 

" Double Garden, The," 172 

Drama, personal character of 
the, 3; effects of, 9, 10; 
power to present ideas, 122, 
123; poetic, 126; Eliza- 
bethan, 127, 142, 181; of 



INDEX 227 

the 19th century, 127; ex- " Florian Geyer," 46, 47, 208 

tempore, 14; classic, 142, Fiske, Mrs., in " Magda," 70, 

181; French, 142, 181; 71 

Chinese, 142; Japanese, Fitch, Mr. Clyde, 7, 15 

142 " Forbidden Fruit," 213 

Dramatic figures, 10, 33, 39, Fox, George, 153 

43, 44, 51, 175 France, Anatole, 3, 4 

Dramatic moments, 35, 13S, Francesca, 145 

139, 140 " Frau Sorge," 74 

Dramatic poetry, 142-144 Freie Biihne, Die, 207, 208 

" Drei Reihefeder, Die," 211 " Friedensfest, Das," 39, 207 

Dumas, Alexandre, 22 " Fritzchen," 211 

Dumas, Alexandre, fils, 23, " Fuhrmann Henschel," 56, 

90, 195 57, 209 

Duse, Signora, in " Magda," Fulda, Ludwig, 206 

70, 71 

"Gay Lord Quex, The," 95, 

Ebbsmith, Mrs., 195 216 

Eckhard, 154 " Genossin, Die," 216 

■ Ehre, Die," 66, 71, 76, 95, George Eliot, 23 
210 George Sand, 22 

"Einakter, Drei," 211 '' Ghosts," 97 

" Einsame Menschen," 39, 207 ■ Giaconda," 189 

Eliot, George, 23 Globe Theatre, 132 

■ Elizabethan drama," 127, Gloria in " You Never Can 

142. 1S1 Tell," 109 

Emerson, 154, 202 ■ Gliick im WinkeL, Das," 210 

" Es lebe das Leben," 78, Gottwald in ■ Hanneles Him- 

181, 211 melfahrt," 46 

" Ewigmannliche, Das," 211 Guido in " Monna Vanna," 

169, 170 

Falstaff, 35 Guise, Duke of, 156, 159 

" Fantastics, The," 205 Gulliver. 114 

Farce, 14 K Guvnor, The," 213 
Faust, 33 

Ferdinand in ■ The Tern- Halbe, Max, 39, 75 

pest," 35 ■ Hamlet," 63, 94, 125, 140, 

Flaubert, 23 185, 198 



INDEX 



Hamlet, 31, 33, 133, 156 

Hannele, 44 

"Hanneles Himmelf ahrt," 

44-47, 60, 208 
Hare, Mr. John, 212, 216 
Hartmann von Aue, 58 
" Haubenlerche, Die," 66 
Hatjptmann, Gerhabdt. 
His becoming known, 37; 
earlier influences, 39, 40; 
a realist, 39, 43; Protean 
character, 41; an individu- 
alist, 57, 58, 75, 79; sym- 
bolism in, 55 ; " Vor Son- 
nenaufgang," 38, 39, 207; 
" Das Friedensfest," 39, 
207; "Einsame Menschen," 
39, 207; "Die Weber," 40, 
208; "Das Biberpelz," 40, 
208; "College Crampton," 
41, 208; "Hanneles Him- 
melf ahrt," 44-47, 60, 208; 
"Florian Geyer," 46, 47, 
208 ; " Die versunkene 
Glocke," 47-55, 188, 189, 
208; "Furhmann Hen- 
schel," 56, 209; " Schluck 
und Jau," 56, 209; "Mi- 
chael Kramer," 57, 209; 
"Der rote Hahn," 57, 209; 
" Der arme Heinrich," 58, 
59, 209;"RoseBernd,"57, 
209; and Rostand, 43; and 
Sudermann, 39, 62, 63, 70, 
75; and Bernard Shaw, 
121; and Maeterlinck, 162; 
plays, 207-209 
Hawthorne, 32, 173 



Hazlitt, 3, 130, 139 
Heffterdingt, Pastor, in 

"Heimat," 71, 77 
"Heimat," 70, 71, 77, 189, 

210 
Heinrich in " Die versunkene 

Glocke," 50-52, 53, 60, 61, 

188 
Heinrich von Aue in "Der 

arme Heinrich," 58, 59 
" Helden," 218 
" Henry V.," 183 
Herder, 2 
Heredia, 139 
" Hernani," Q2 f 26 
"Herod," 86, 126, 134, 140, 

144, 220 
" Hester's Mystery," 212 
" Hobby Horse, The," 214 
Holmes, 135 
Homer, 180 
" Honour," 210 
Hosea, 4 

" How He Lied to Her Hus- 
band," 219 
Howells, extract from " The 

Story of a Play," 83 

Ibsen, 7, 39, 44, 92, 95, 105, 

176, 193 
Idas in "Marpessa," 140 
" Imprudence," 213 
Individualism, 79 
"Interieur," 166, 221 
"Intrus, L'," 159, 161, 162, 

166, 221 
" Iris," 89, 95, 96, 194, 217 
Iris, 89, 97, 194 



INDEX 



Irving Place Theatre, 48, 

205, 207, 209 
Isaiah, 4 
Ivanhoe, 26 

Job, 33 

" Johannes," 211 
" Johannisfeuer," 211 
."John Bull's Other Island," 

219 
John Oliver Hobbes, 90 
Jones, H. A., 84, 98 
" Joyzelle," 170-172, 222 
Joyzelle, 171, 172 
Judith, 172 
Juliet 17, 34, 191 

Kahn, M. Gustave, 14, 15 
Kane, Archibald, in " Iris," 

96 
Katharsis, 200 
Keats, quoted, 34, 165; 

opinions, 50, 180; drama, 

127 
Kendal, Mr. and Mrs., 212, 

215 
" King Lear," 130 
Kipling, 108 
Klopstock, 91 

"Lady Bountiful," 215 

Lamb, 130 

Landscape, 5 

Lear, 34 

Leonora in " Die Ehre," 76 

Lessing, 91 

"Letty," 87, 95, 96, 97, 217 

Letty, 88 



Letchmere in "Letty," 87-89 

Literary plays, 90 

"Lonely Lives," 207 

Lord Chamberlain's Men, 132 

Lord Quex, 95 

" Lords and Commons," 213 

" Low Water," 213 

Lowell, 135 

Ludicrous, the, 192 

Macaulay, 13 

" Macbeth," 94 

Macready, 143 

" Madame Bovary," 23 

Maeterlinck, Maurice. In- 
troduction to the world of 
letters, 147; early dialogue, 
148; early manner, 150, 
151; philosophy, 152-155; 
earlier dramatic theory, 
155-158; application in 
earlier plays, 159, 160; 
symbolism, 165, 173, 174; 
fundamental idea, 171 ; 
" La Princesse Maleine," 
159, 160, 161, 221; quoted, 
148, 149; "L'Intrus," 159, 
161, 166, 221 ; " Les Aveu- 
gles," 159, 160, 221; "Les 
Sept Princesses," 159, 160, 
161, 221; " Pelleas et Meli- 
sande," 161-165, 221 ; " Al- 
ladine et Palamides," 165, 
221; "Aglavaine et Sely- 
sette," 165, 221; " In- 
terieur," 166, 221; "La 
Mort de Tintagiles," 47, 
165, 221; "Sceur Bea- 



230 INDEX 

trice," 166, 222; " Ariane et Marie in " Heimat," 73 
Barbe Bleue," 166-168, 222; Marius, 155, 159 
" Monna Vanna," 168-170, " Marpessa," quoted, 141 
224; "Joyzelle," 170, 171, Marpessa, 140 
222; "Le Tr6sor des Matthews, Brander, quota- 
Humbles," 152, 153, 154; tion from, 35, 92, 183 
" Les Abeilles," 174; " The " Mauprat," 23 
Double Garden," 172; and Melisande, 168 
Rostand, 162; and Haupt- Melissande in "La Princesse 
mann, 162; and Stephen Lointaine," 19, 20, 205 
Phillips, 162; plays, 221, Melodrama, 14 
222 Merlin in "Joyzelle," 170, 

"Magda," 70, 210. See 171 

" Heimat " Metchnikoff, 187 

Magda in "Heimat," 70-73, Metternich in "L'Aiglon," 

210; and Anna Mahr, 39 32 

« Magistrate, The," 91, 213, "Michael Kramer," 57, 209 

214 " Midsummer Night's Dream, 

Maldonado in " Iris," 89, 96 A," 130 

"Man and Superman," 109, Miranda in "The Tempest," 

117-120, 124, 219 35 

" Man and His Picture, The," Mirbeau, M. Octave, 147 

210 "Monna Vanna," 168-170, 

" Man of Destiny, The," 218 222 

" Man with the Glove, The," " Monte Cristo," 23 

139 "Money Spinner," 212 

" Manfred," 55, 136-138 Moliere, 41, 44, 91 

Mandeville, Mr., in " Letty," Morell, Rev. James in " Can- 

88 dida," 109-111, 114, 116, 

Mansfield, Mr. Richard, 206, 123 

218 Morelli, 2 

Marchbanks in " Candida," " Morituri," 211 

111-113, 114, 115, 189 Morris, Miss Clara, quoted, 

Marco in " Monna Vanna," 85 

168-170 " Mort de Tintagiles, La," 47, 

Marguerite Gautier in " La 165, 221 

Dame aux Camelias," 23, "Mrs. Warren's Profession," 

195 106, 123, 218 



INDEX 



231 



" Mutter Erde," 39 
Mystics, 153-155 

Naturalists, 19 

Naturalismus, 62 

Newcome, Colonel, 33 

Neo-realism, 117 

" Nero," 220 

Nickelmann, The, in "Die 

versunkene Glocke," 48, 

189 
Nietzsche, 105 
Nordau, Max, 148 
" Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, 

The," 93, 216 
Novalis, 152 

Othello, 156 

"Paolo and Francesca," 144, 
145, 220 

Pantomime, 14 

" Paracelsus," 142 

Pastor in " Die versunkene 
Glocke," 52 

Pater, Walter, 3 

"Pauline," 142 

" Pelleas et Melisande," 161- 
164, 165, 171, 181, 221 

Pelleas, 172 

Percinet in "Les Roman- 
esques," 17-19 

" Philanderers, The," 105, 
118, 218 

Phillips, Stephen, 126, 
127, 134, 145; and the 
poetic drama, 126-128, 
134-136; his language, 141; 
" Herod," 86, 126, 134, 140, 



220; "Ulysses," 130, 220; 
" Paolo and Francesca," 
144, 145, 220; "The Sin 
of David," 220; "Nero," 
220; "Marpessa," 141; 
plays, 220 

" Philoctetes," 136 

Phosphorus, 202 

Photine in "La Samari- 
taine," 205 

Piers the Ploughman, 114 

"Pilgrim's Progress, The," 
200 

Pinero, Arthur Wing. 
Stagecraft, 83-87; dra- 
matic art, 87-89; literary 
character, 89-91 ; specific 
genre, 91 ; so-called " prob- 
lem plays," 92-95, 183, 
194; a dramatist, 98; an 
actor, 213; "Two Hun- 
dred a Year," 212; 
"Daisy's Escape," 212; 
"Hester's Mystery," 212; 
"Bygones," 212; "The 
Money Spinner," 212; 
"Imprudence," 213; "The 
Squire," 213; "The Rec- 
tor," 213; "Boys and 
Girls," 213; "The Rocket," 
213; "Lords and Com- 
mons," 213; "Low Water," 
213; "The Weaker Sex," 
213, 214 ; " The Magistrate," 
91, 213; "The Schoolmis- 
tress," 214; "The Hobby 
Horse," 214; "Dandy 
Dick," 214: " Sweet Laven- 



INDEX 



der," 91,214; " The Profli- 
gate," 87, 93, 214; "The 
Cabinet Minister," 215 ; 
"Lady Bountiful," 215; 
"The Times," 215; "The 
Amazons," 215 ; " The Sec- 
ond Mrs. Tanqueray," 91, 
93, 215; "The Notorious 
Mrs. Ebbsmith," 93, 216; 
" The Benefit of the Doubt," 
216; "The Princess and the 
Butterfly," 99, 216; " Tre- 
lawney of the Wells," 216; 
" The Gay Lord Quex," 95, 
216; "Iris," 89, 95, 96, 97, 
194, 217; "Letty," 87, 95, 
96, 97, 217; " A Wife with- 
out a Smile," 217; and 
Robertson, 98, 99; and 
Mrs. Craigie, 99; and 
Bernard Shaw, 120; plays, 
212-217 

Playgoing, effects of, 3, 4, 9 

" Plays, Pleasant and Un- 
pleasant," 219 

" Plays for Puritans, Three," 
219 

Plotinus, 153 

Poe, 180 

Poetry, in public, 135 ; on the 
stage, 133, 134 

Pope, 10, 200 

Preese, Janet, in " The Prof- 
ligate," 87 

" Princess and the Butter- 
fly, The," 99, 216 

*' Princesse Lointaine, La," 
19, 196, 205 



" Princesse Maleine, La," 148, 

159, 160, 161, 221 
Problem plays, 92-95, 194, 

195 
"Profligate, The," 87, 99, 

214 
" Prometheus Bound," 185, 

198 
Prossy, Miss, in "Candida," 

9, 116 

Raina in "Arms and the 

Man," 107 
Rautendelein in " Die ver- 

sunkene Glocke," 49, 50, 53 
Ravenswood, Master of, 26 
Realism, 25 
Realismus, 62 

Realists, 19; mode of pres- 
entation, 42 
Reaumer, 174 
" Rector, The," 213 
Reichstadt, Due de, 32, 197 
Rembrandt, 139 
" Remorse," 127 
Renshaw, Dunstan, in " The 

Profligate," 87 
Robert in "Die Ehre," 66, 

67, 69, 76 
Robertson and Pinero, 98, 

99 
" Rocket, The," 213 
Rougon-Macquart Family, 23 
Romance, 18, 26 
" Romanesques, Les," 16, 17 
Romanticists, 32; mode of 

presentation, 43 
Romeo, 17, 191 



INDEX 



"Romeo and Juliet," 125, 
129, 191 

" Rose Bernd," 57, 209 

Rostand, Edmond. Re- 
ception into the Academy, 
12; position in literature, 
13; mode of presenting 
truth, 19; success in ro- 
manticism, 25 ; so-called 
pessimism, 29, 33; kind of 
romanticism, 32 ; content 
with dramatic effect, 35; 
no problems, 35, 92, 183; 
no criticism of life, 35, 92, 
183; idea of tragedy, 196, 
197; "Les Romanesques," 
16-18, 205; "La Princesse 
Lointaine," 19-21, 196, 205; 
" La Samaritaine," 21, 205; 
" Cyrano de Bergerac," 22- 
30, 196, 205; " L'Aiglon," 
30-32, 197, 206; and Haupt- 
mann, 37, 43, 51; and 
Sudermann, 65, 81; and 
Bernard Shaw, 121; and 
Maeterlinck, 47, 162; plays, 
205, 206 

" Rote Hahn, Der," 209 

Roxane in " Cyrano de Ber- 
gerac," 29 

Rudel in " La Princesse 
Lointaine," 19, 35, 51, 196 

Ruskin, 3, 4 

Ruysbroeck, 154 

Sainte-Beuve, 2 

" Samaritaine, La," 21, 205 

Sand, George, 22 



Sardanapalus, 127 

Sartorius, M., in "Wid- 
owers' Houses," 123 

" Schlachtenlenker, Der," 219 

"Schluck und Jau," 57, 209 

"Schmetterl ingsschlacht, 
Die," 211 

" School," 99 

" Schoolmistress, The," 214 

Schwartze, Lieutenant Col- 
onel, in "Heimat," 72, 81 

Scott, 18, 23, 127 

" Second Mrs. Tanqueray, 
The," 91, 93, 176, 181, 215, 
216 

Selysette, 168 

" Sept Princesses, Les," 159, 
160, 161, 221 

Shakespeare, 2, 4, 29, 31, 44, 
85, 102, 103, 128, 131, 132, 
136, 147, 180, 184 

Shandy, Mr., 193 

Sharpe, Mr. William, 151 

Shaw, George Bernard. 
Stagecraft, 102 ; ideas, 
104; how presented, 122, 
124; realism, 108; neo- 
realism, 117; realistic bril- 
liancy, 120, 121; "Wid- 
owers' Houses," 105, 123, 
218; "The Philanderers," 
106, 118, 218; "Mrs. War- 
ren's Profession," 106, 123, 
218; " Arms and the Man," 
106, 108, 218; "You 
Never Can Tell," 109, 118, 
229; "Candida," 109-116, 
218; "The Man of Des- 



234 



INDEX 



tiny," 218; "The Devil's 
Disciple," 219; "Caesar and 
Cleopatra," 219 ; " Captain 
Brassbound's Conversion," 
219 ; " Man and Superman," 
109, 117-120, 124, 219; 
"How He Lied to Her 
Husband," 219; "John 
Bull's Other Island," 219; 
and Rostand, 121; and 
Hauptmann, 121 ; and 
Sudermann, 121; and Pi- 
nero, 120; and Shake- 
speare, 102; plays, 218, 
219 

Shelley, 127 

Sheridan, 91, 127 

" Sin of David, The," 220 

"Sistine Madonna," 180 

" Sodom's Ende," 68, 71, 76, 
95, 97, 139, 210 

" Soeur Beatrice," 166, 222 

Sophocles, 2 

" Sordello," 143 

Sorismonde in " La Princesse 
Lointaine," 19, 20 

Sothern, Mr. Edward, 48, 
191, 209 

Spielhagen, 38 

Squarciafico in " La Princesse 
Lointaine," 20 

"Squire, The," 213 

Stage, The, a public place, 
100; of Shakespeare, 103 

Stagecraft, 83-86, 102, 103 

Stage Society, The, 218 

Stael, Mme. de, 2 

Stevenson, 23, 26, 42 



"Strafford," 143 

Straker, 'Enery, in "Man 
and Superman," 123 

Strindberg, 7 

"Story of a Play, The," 
quoted, 83 

" Sturmgeselle Sokrates, 

Der," 211 

Sudermann, Heinrich. 
General critical opinion on, 
62; general character, 63; 
a personal writer, 64; his 
motives, 65 ; his " dramatic 
theme," 75; no especial in- 
dividualist, 79; impression 
of his power, 80, 81 ; " Die 
Ehre," 66-68, 71, 76, 95, 
210; "Sodom's Ende," 
68-70, 71, 76, 95, 97, 210; 
"Heimat," 70, 73, 77, 95, 
210; "Die Schmetterlings- 
schlacht, 211; "Das Gliick 
im Winkel," 211; " Mori- 
turi," 211; "Teja," 211; 
"Fritzchen," 211; "Das 
Ewig Mannliche," 211 ; 
" Johannes," 211 ; " Die 
Drei Reihefeder," 211; 
" Johannisfeuer," 211 ; " Es 
lebe das Leben," 71, 78, 
211 ; " Der Sturmgeselle 
Sokrates," 64, 211; "Frau 
Sorge," 74; and Haupt- 
mann, 39, 62, 63, 70, 75; 
and Wildenbruch, 62; and 
Bernard Shaw, 121; plays, 
210, 211 

"Sweet Lavender," 91, 214 



INDEX 235 

Swinburne, 127 Tragic figures, 34, 81 

Sylvette in " Les Roman- Trast, Graf, in " Die Ehre," 

esques," 17-19 67, 76, 124 

Symbolism, nature of, 55; in Tree, Mr. Beerbohm, 86, 126, 

"Die versunkene Glocke," 134, 140 

50, 56; of Blake, 55; of " Trelawney of the Wells," 

Maeterlinck, 152, 173, 174 216 

Trench, in "Widowers* 
Taine, 2 Houses," 123 

" Tale of Two Cities, The," Trenwith in " Iris," 95 

47 " Tristan und Isolde," 139 

Tanqueray, Mrs., 9, 195 Trollope, Anthony, 26 

Tate, Nahum, 35 " Two Hundred a Year," 
" Teja," 211 212 

Tennyson, 36, 143, 144, 197; 

his plays, 127 "Ulysses," 130, 144, 220 

Teufelsdroeckh, 29, 114 Uncle Toby, My, 193 
*' Teufelskerl, Ein," 219 

Thackeray, 23, 113, 117 Valentine* in " You Never 
Theatre, French, 135 Can Tell," 109 

Theatrical criticism, 6, 8 Vanna, Monna, 169, 170, 171, 
Tolstoi, 38, 39, 41 172 

"Three Musketeers, The," Verhaeren, 46 

23 "Versunkene Glocke, Die," 
" Times, The," 215 9, 46, 47, 56, 181, 208 

" Tisserands, Les," 208 Vivien in " Mrs. Warren's 
Tragedy. The great thing in Profession," 123 

literature, 33-35, 180; Mr. Voltaire, 91 

Courtney on, 176; Words- "Vor Sonnenaufgang," 38, 

worth on, 177; Aristotle on, 207 

199; simplest notion of, 

186; range of, 188; its true Wagner, 105 

character, 188-190, 198; ef- "Weaker Sex, The," 213, 

feet of, 200-202; in love, 214 

191; of Browning, 178; of Weber and Fields burlesque, 

Rostand, 196; of Pinero, 14 

194; in "Die versunkene "Weber, Die," 40, 58, 208 

Glocke," 188 Weyman, Stanley, 25 



236 



INDEX 



Whistler, 42 

" Widowers* Houses," 105, 

123, 218 
Wildenbruch, 62, 63, 66 
Willy Janikow in " Sodom's 

Ende," 69, 77, 81 
Winter, Mr. William, 214 
Wittich in "Die versunkene 

Glocke," 49 
Wordsworth, 127, 177 
« Wife without a Smile, A," 

217 



Wyndham, Mr. (now Sir 
Charles), 206 

Yeats, Mr. W. B., 7 
Ygraine in " La Mort de 

Tintagiles," 166, 168 
"You Never Can Tell," 109, 

118, 219 

Zenobia, 174 
Zimmermann, Dr., 40 
Zola, 20 t 23, 38, 39, 41 



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